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Tech Startup Kaltura: Our R&D “Always Will Remain in Israel”

The dream of every startup is to foresee and capitalize on revolutionary trends, and the video technology company Kaltura has been doing just that. Founded in 2006 by Israeli serial entrepreneurs Ron Yekutiel, Shay David, Michal Tsur and Eran Etam, Kaltura was listed by Forbes last June as one of the top 25 hot Israeli tech startups to watch this year. A business-to-business, open-source online platform, Kaltura powers the videos produced by hundreds of thousands of media, corporate and educational institutions, among them HBO, Disney, ABC, Warner, Paramount, IBM, Intel, Ikea, Bank of America and Harvard University. “The world is becoming much more visual than textual,” CEO Ron Yekutiel tells ISRAEL21c at Kaltura’s subsidiary office in Ramat Gan (the technically American company, called Delaware Corporation, also has branches in New York, London, Sao Paulo and soon in Asia-Pacific). “We will watch it grow more and more videofied.” Indeed, he quips, “The saying goes that a picture is worth 1,000 words; in video, there are 30 frames every second. So you could say that a video second is worth 30,000 words.” Yekutiel, 40, who divides his time between Israel and the United States, says that by the end of the year Kaltura will have 400 staff members worldwide, half of them in Israel. “The core engine of our research and development is and always will remain in Israel, but not out of necessity,” he says, explaining that though he and his cofounders (several of whom have PhDs) are all native Israelis, when they founded Kaltura they were scattered across the world. Nor are any of Kaltura’s investors Israeli. “We could have based our operations anywhere. But we wanted to do it here, both from a Zionist perspective and out of a belief in the technology and the people.” (via Israel21c)

[Photo: Kaltura / YouTube]