Ariel Sella, Israel
Keynote Lecturer
Ariel Sella is the Managing Director of Capsula, a unique University Institute which promotes innovation in Smart Mobility through grants to researchers and accelerator residencies to entrepreneurs. Capsula has so far dispensed more than 10 research grants and graduated 15 startups. The Summer ‘16 cohort includes startups from Israel and abroad developing autonomous vehicle sensors, automotive cybersecurity, shared economy, machine learning for smart city, freight forwarding exchange, autonomous delivery and city cycling apps.
Prior to Capsula Ariel was an advisor, in the areas of smart energy, smart mobility and entrepreneurship to venture funds, firms, startups and universities. His assignments included Foundation Capital in the area of Electronic Design Automation, defence contractor RAFAEL in the area of microgrids; Indegy in cybersecurity for critical infrastructure; Phinergy in grid energy storage; Meteo-Logic in energy trading; BrightSource in spinout entrepreneurship; Bar Ilan University in research innovation. As a pro bono mentor to early stage entrepreneurs, Ariel worked with companies in a diverse range of domains including solar energy, energy storage, energy retailing, fleet cybersecurity and more.
Before then Ariel and his family lived for nearly a decade in Silicon Valley where he was CEO of venture funded companies in the semiconductor and supply chain domains. In the preceding decade, living in Israel, Ariel co-founded two startups which were subsequently acquired, and was a founding partner of Formula Ventures, an early stage fund managing more than $150 million, with exits such as Radlan and Phonetic Systems to his name.
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Ariel worked in the semiconductor and Electronic Design Automation fields starting as a chip designer at Intel and concluding as the founder of new division at EDA leader Cadence Design Systems.
Ariel spent his early years in Israel, Ghana, Japan and the Philippines and received a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is married to Sofia, an architect and Technion lecturer with whom he has three children – Tamar who is pursuing a PhD in ethnomusicology at Harvard, Yehonatan who is pursuing a PhD in mathematics at UCLA and Evyatar, a musically oriented high school student in Israel.
