The Journey of Mati Kochavi as an Israeli Entrepreneur

Mati Kochavi business & activities

Mati Kochavi is an Israeli entrepreneur who has gained prominence in cutting-edge technology, digital media, and film-making.

A graduate of the University of Haifa, Kochavi started his business career with a broad spectrum of diverse interests, all of which led him to ride the wave of technological and IT revolution in the early 1990s. Throughout his career, Kochavi has focused on innovations that earned him the spotlight in various media articles and is a recipient of more than 40 awards for the content, digital products, and films made under his guidance.

Kochavi has a keen interest in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Computer Vision and Machine Learning (ML), and the Internet of Things (IoT). With this mindset, he incorporated AGT International, a global IoT company, in 2007 as its owner and Chairman.

AGT International soon was to manage complex physical environments through IoT data. The challenges tackled include managing infrastructure, urban management, food safety, and management of natural resources. Based on the implementation of the latest achievements in AI and IoT technologies, AGT has provided an analytical solution for the creative extraction and processing of sensor-based data from various physical environments, the result of which is the use of these data as a storytelling device.

Guided by the vision of changing the way we perceive the world through technological lenses, Kochavi’s AGT group implemented some of the most extensive global IoT projects, with massive billion-dollars investments in infrastructure, healthcare, public safety, smart cities, environmental protection, and sports.

To help these projects come to life sooner, AGT developed its native AI-based platform called IoTA, which was tasked with providing cognitive capabilities for a better and deeper understanding of the physical world that surrounds us. To better understand, interpret and utilize these physical environments, IoTA provides its users with the tools to interpret, understand and reason physical environments focusing on their specific needs.

In 2016, Mati partnered with Ari Emanual of WME IMG to create the digital platform HEED. Its mission is to merge physical and digital worlds and provide sports lovers real-time insights about the sporting event they are watching.

Moving beyond designing technology that changes the way people interact with the external world, Kochavi made it his life goal to create a custom AI-based solution that would help the human body live, work, and train in a better and healthier way. The result is COACH-AI – an engine that allows developers to design products to improve physical activity based on state-of-the-art visual technology.

With the COACH-AI engine, human physical activities and mobility are seamlessly embedded into virtual environments with the help of custom-made and dedicated applications. This solution supports delivering a wholly new user experience in which augmented, mixed, and metaverse realities are seamlessly merged with the movement of the human body and physical objects, in the real world. Once these components are fully integrated with the help of COACH-AI, Kochavi envisions the resulting products would easily find their place in the world of sports, education, child development, healthcare, entertainment, and games.

His vision came to life quite soon as COACH-AI was first used by leading brands to develop products and applications. These apps that utilize augmented reality and computer vision provide their users with access to training routines, such as those used by professional football players and thus improve their health and physical performance. Other notable examples include an AI dance teacher and an AI occupational therapists for young people.

Mati is also the founder of the award-winning Vocativ Studio, a company in charge of producing premium television and digital content for its partners. They, among others, include leading US-based media outlets such as Discovery, NBC Universal, and Showtime. Together with his daughter Adi, Mati created the documentary TV series Dark Net, which explores the dark aspects of the modern-day web and related technologies.

Long-time experience with working in the visual medium has inspired Kochavi to launch an award-winning series called Eva.Stories in 2019. Together with his daughter Maya, Mati came up with the idea of an Instagram-based series of short multimedia pieces that were produced as make-believe posts of a real-life girl Eva Heyman, a 13-year-old Holocaust victim who lived in Nagyvarad (Hungary) during World War II. Some 220 stories about Eva and her final days were produced with a team of actors on professional sets. With this project, Kochavi intended to depict the daily life of an adolescent girl during the time of the Holocaust in a medium that was tailored to the needs of Generation Z viewers and other digital natives.

Eva Stories garnered 300 million views and 200 million google searches within 48 hours of its release. The film was covered by over 1000 media outlets around the world and won more than 20 awards. Over 20 presidents and world leaders posted about it on multiple platforms.