‘I want any teenager with problems to know that life doesn’t end with school,’ says Shilo Ben Zeev. ‘If you push your dream and don’t give up, you can do a lot.’
The typical successful Israeli startup entrepreneur bears no resemblance to Shilo Ben Zeev.
He wasn’t a Scout leader. He didn’t serve in an elite army intelligence unit. He has no college degree. In fact, he barely made it through high school.
At best ignored and at worst bullied, Ben Zeev had a difficult childhood.
“I was fat and had lots of health problems. I didn’t have friends. My father didn’t believe in me. Altogether, I couldn’t really be a good student,” says Ben Zeev, who was raised in a religious family in Jerusalem.
After high school, the army rejected Ben Zeev because of his weight. Determined to be a soldier, he went on a strict diet for seven months. But despite losing 40 kilos (88 pounds) and entering the armored corps – where he made his first real friends — his IDF service was cut short when they discovered he had Type 1 diabetes.
Nevertheless, through a lot of sweat equity and a knack for identifying golden opportunities and business partners, Ben Zeev became a serial med-tech entrepreneur.
One of his cofounded companies, Emendo Biotherapeutics, was acquired in 2020 by Japanese pharmaceutical company AnGes for $300 million.
“I want any teenager with problems to know that life doesn’t end with school,” he tells ISRAEL21c.
“I became an entrepreneur with no skills. If you push your dream and don’t give up, you can do a lot. There were years when I struggled to make a living, and I lost two toes to diabetes. But life is not about happiness, it’s about achievement. So keep fighting. At some point, baruch Hashem [thank God], it gets better.”
A man who gets things done
After the army, Ben Zeev worked for the Likud political party until he was about 28.
His physician, Prof. Itamar Raz, now head of the Israel National Council of Diabetes, spotted potential in Ben Zeev. “He saw that I knew how to get things done.”
When Raz founded the D-Cure Fund in 2004 to advance diabetes research in Israel and abroad, he asked Ben Zeev to be its CEO.
Shilo Ben Zeev, serial med-tech entrepreneur. Photo by Tamar Paluch
“I can’t say I did very well,” he admits. “I didn’t even speak English then.”
But his one-year stint at D-Cure sparked a life-changing interest in medical technology.
In 2006, Ben Zeev joined LifeWave, a connected health solution that produced a device for treating diabetic wounds. As chief operating officer, he was instrumental in taking the company public on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
His next venture was cofounding LabStyle Innovations. Its flagship product was MyDario, a compact glucose meter connected to mobile devices through a diabetes management app.
“It was the first time an iPhone was used as a medical device,” says Ben Zeev, whose business model was to sell test strips for the glucometer.
Although MyDario won awards for its revolutionary approach, ultimately what survived was the app rather than the device.
In 2016, two years after Ben Zeev sold his share, the company was renamed DarioHealth and its new owners created a widely used digital platform for managing chronic health conditions.
“Then I met Dr. David Baram and we founded three companies: MyBiotics, [a microbiome pharmaceutical company]; Smartzyme Biopharma, [a diagnostics and therapeutics company that builds advanced tools for protein engineering]; and Emendo Biotherapeutics, [which develops gene editing tools for genetic disorders]. We sold Emendo last year in a deal orchestrated by David, and he remains its CEO.”