Author: IDO

Fractyl Health???s mission is to cure metabolic diseases by addressing their root cause: insulin resistance. The company has developed an innovative minimally invasive outpatient approach to treat insulin resistance with a medical device. The device is designed to rejuvenate the lining of the duodenum which leads to a significant decrease in insulin resistance. Currently, the device targets patients with type 2 diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

Fractyl???s device is a treatment of the underlying disease and not just its symptoms. Clinical trials are being held in various locations around the world, with promising results, and commercialization has started in Europe.

Golden Gate Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm headquartered in Singapore with an on the ground presence in Jakarta, Indonesia. Since 2011, the firm has invested in over 35 companies across Southeast Asia. The firm invests in Startups in Southeast Asia that leverage technology and the internet to scale rapidly and disrupt existing industries ??? from e-commerce to payments, marketplaces to content portals, mobile apps to B2B, IoT to SaaS platforms. internet and mobile start-ups across e-commerce, fintech, mobile applications, and SaaS platforms.

With Golden Gate Venture???s diverse range of portfolio companies, and their active involvement in their development, this investment provides an excellent platform for the introduction of new technologies and solutions for Oman.

Nibras is a digital oilfield platform (DOF), designed to optimize operations and maintenance of oil and gas assets. Built in-house by Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), Nibras was spun out and became a product of the newly incorporated company, Innovation Technical Solution LLC (ITS). The platform gathers data by utilizing existing corporate data sources. It integrates them to perform automated analysis and presents the findings through a dashboard that are available to the management for identification of issues in the fields, and for effective planning and utilization of resources, providing them with the opportunity to optimize production processes.

This unique system allows for easier and faster decision making thus resulting in less downtime, and therefore increasing production and revenue.

With oil and gas being the largest industry in Oman, Nibras is an essential tool in ensuring efficiencies and mitigating losses. Since it was developed in-house, in the largest oil and gas organization, the impact was felt immediately. Nibras is now in the pilot phase in multiple oil development companies outside of MENA, thus promoting Oman as a leader in oil and gas innovation.

Juvenescence is a developer of therapeutics designed to increase healthy human longevity. They are building a portfolio of therapeutic assets targeting ageing, regeneration and the diseases of aging. Juvenescence and its portfolio companies use AI and machine learning techniques to discover and develop new drugs. They have established strong partnerships with numerous universities and institutions, most notably The Buck Institute for Research on Ageing.

With its portfolio of medical innovators, Juvenessence???s technologies have the impact both the medical and economics of longevity and ageing.

Locum???s Nest is a web platform and mobile application which allows hospitals to fill vacant locum (also known as temporary staffing) positions internally whilst also providing external locums access to temporary jobs posted by hospitals. Locum???s Nest is focusing on the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK which has historically relied on their internal lists of locums and external agencies to fill their temporary shifts at a high cost.

Locum???s Nest offers a better, more cost-effective service in finding suitable locums for hospitals compared to existing agencies. With the current budget strains throughout the medical industry, Locum???s Nest offers an alternative to agencies whilst maintaining the highest level of doctors and medical professionals to hospitals.

Polares Medical is an early and clinical-stage medical device company working on developing a technology that can address mitral valve regurgitation: a common cardiovascular disease. The company is based in Switzerland with Ra large office in Palo Alto, California. The company spun-out of Symetis (acquired by Boston Scientific) which developed a technology to treat aortic valve stenosis, to fully concentrate its efforts on the mitral valve of the heart.

Polares is currently developing a passive implant that would serve not as a repair nor a replacement of the Mitral Valve (MV) but as a partial replacement, which is a fast and cost-effective treatment than the current offering.

Sense Labs is an energy monitoring device that plugs in to residential distribution boxes and is able to give the consumer in real-time total home intelligence in terms of total energy usage as well as different devices in the house and the energy they are consuming. The application is also increasingly integrating with smart home players such as Nest Labs and Wemo Plugs so that the consumer can have more control as well as visibility of what???s going on in the household. Sense has successfully completed pilots with energy monitoring organization to successfully reduce unnecessary energy consumption within its customer base, by identifying heavy energy consumption from ???Always On??? devices.

Sense is one of very few energy monitoring devices that has disaggregation capabilities of different devices and is able to get more than a million datapoints per second. It is already working with 30,000 homes across the USA and Canada, and is increasing at a promising rate. Apart from the great potential for energy monitoring, it partners well with solar devices and allows monitoring of solar energy production and use.

Teal Drones, a company producing the first-of-their-kind high-performance drones that have AI on board running in real time. The company currently manufactures its own drones, hardware and software, and have applied it towards the defense industry for reconnaissance use. The company is now starting to expand what the platform is capable of and what the drone is able to do and applying it to different enterprise use cases.

In 2020 Teal was featured by the United States DoD???s Defense Innovation Unit as a ???Blue sUAS???. Teal now officially provides a compliant drone solution for American Government and Industry, being part of a list of only 5 agencies approved throughout the USA.

Tribe Capital is a venture capital firm out of San Francisco, USA, that invests in early-stage technology companies that are identified using data science and analytics. Specializing and applying data science to VC enables Tribe Capital to source, evaluate and win highly-competitive deals, a unique model which sets them apart from other traditional VC firms.

Through Tribe Capital???s portfolio companies, IDO will get the chance to gain meaningful insight to the fastest growing VC sector in the world, Software.

Voltea is a water treatment company which provides water purification products and services, utilizing a novel desalination technology called capacitive de-ionization (CapDI). CapDI is less energy intensive and more efficient than Reverse Osmosis (RO) leading to better efficiency at a lower cost. CapDI is an excellent candidate for industrial applications where large manufacturing companies can reuse their water, thus becoming less reliant on municipal supply. CapDI also effectively removes dissolved salts from water before it is fed into sensitive equipment

Voltea has two main products for two separate markets, industrial (IS Series) and commercial (Di-Use/Entry), allowing maximum market penetration. It currently has distributions across Europe and the USA.

Voltea commenced operations in Oman in 2018 serving the GCC area and India. Interest has been promising and units are in pilot phases in Oman, the UAE and Kuwait.