For decades, Sderot and the Western Negev appeared in the news mainly as places under fire. Today, a different story is taking shape just a few kilometers away, inside the classrooms and laboratories of Sapir Academic College.
Sapir has built a pipeline that turns student research into companies, and it is quietly becoming the Western Negev’s leading academic institution in the process.
The shift starts with the college’s president, Prof. Nir Kedar, who has rejected the old model of academia standing apart from its region.
“Sapir is much more than an academic institution. It is a key anchor in the Western Negev. We have a duty and responsibility to be active partners in shaping the future of this region, turning knowledge and ideas into a lever for growth and innovation,” Kedar said.
He is just as clear about what this partnership demands: capability rather than philanthropic support. “I do not ask to open hearts or the coffers of philanthropic funds, but rather invite partners to action, to share our vision, our expertise, and our professional paths.”
That distinction between philanthropic support and capability runs through everything Sapir has built since October 7, 2023. It is also reflected in the college’s new positioning as “An Academic Space of Impact,” a name that captures Sapir’s ambition to turn academic knowledge into measurable social, technological, and economic change.
Dikla Siso, the college’s manager of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, spent 14 years helping build Beersheba’s high-tech ecosystem before taking on this role. She has pushed the region to change how it talks about itself.
“We need to change the disc of October 7, shifting from ‘come help us, let us rise again’ to a narrative of excellence,” Siso said. For her, the investment case is straightforward. “We actually have immense value, highly qualitative human capital, and a space of real business opportunities. Come join the opportunity.”
Under Siso’s direction, Sapir has built an actual pipeline rather than a slogan, and the evidence is a growing list of student ventures now moving into the market. At the heart of this effort is Sapir’s newly established Faculty of Technology, which brings together technological education, applied research, industry partnerships, and entrepreneurship.
The faculty provides the academic and professional foundation needed to develop a new generation of engineers, researchers, and founders — and, crucially, to give them reasons and opportunities to build their careers in the Western Negev.
Sapir is consciously linking its intellectual assets directly to the Western Negev’s long-term commercial opportunities, ensuring that students, researchers, and local industries work in lockstep.
The academic pipeline: From classroom to market
This vision is manifested through a structured academic-to-market pipeline anchored in Sapir’s new Faculty of Technology. It begins with Chai B’Sapir, the college’s internal innovation and entrepreneurship infrastructure.
Through specialized laboratories, clinics, and hands-on academic programs, students acquire the skills and resources needed to move from research and coursework to prototypes and venture creation.
Once incubated, these ideas transition into Chai B’Merhav, the region’s first early-stage accelerator program. This sequential framework ensures that students graduate with viable, locally rooted businesses rather than entrepreneurship theory alone. It bridges the gap between raw academic talent and local kibbutz industries, giving students a platform to solve real-world industrial challenges.
SafeZone, an AI computer vision system that flags safety violations on industrial sites in under a second, was founded by two Sapir computer science graduates: Ofek Ben David and Bar Moshe.
TheMain.ai, a silicon safety chip that physically cuts power to a robot the instant it crosses a human safety boundary, was born inside Sapir’s Practica program, the hands-on track where students move from coursework to prototypes.
Endfills, an automated recycling sorter built by environmental engineer Dima Kaplan, developed its sensor-fusion hardware in direct collaboration with Sapir engineering students, who helped build the physical prototypes.
These are companies with founders, hardware, and customers, and they all started on Sapir’s campus.
That same pipeline reaches beyond computer science and engineering into the wider communities Sapir serves. TR Impact, an AI-powered addiction recovery platform, was founded by a Bedouin-Israeli team from Rahat: Aseel Abu Agami, Estemill al-Abed, Nahia Jbarien, Alaa Abu Wahid, and Muhammad Abu al-Hija.
Their app provides patients with psychology-backed tracking and an AI companion, while clinical teams work from a linked dashboard designed to flag relapse risk before it happens.
CoreWise, founded by PhD candidate Lidor Dahan together with Ariel Ohayon and Liron Bekman, uses ordinary smartphone LiDAR scanning to detect construction defects that once required slow manual inspection.
Both ventures emerged from the same incubator track as SafeZone and TheMain.ai. Together, they demonstrate a pipeline that extends across disciplines and the region’s diverse communities.
The alliance built around Sapir is what turns individual successes into a regional pattern. Sapir start-ups move into SouthUp, the regional accelerator led by Gil Shachar, and into HaMitbah, the Western Negev Innovation Authority, in which Sapir is a co-owner.
Nissim Bar-El, a longtime figure in the region’s innovation ecosystem, described the system as a rigorous filter that turns raw academic talent into ventures ready for real investment. The result is a seamless corridor: research at Sapir, screening and mentorship at SouthUp, and scaling and connections to government and investors through HaMitbah.
The research base behind this pipeline is also expanding. Dr. Ayelet Sapir, director of the college’s Research Authority, is building five new institutes aimed at turning the region’s own challenges into exportable science.
Put together, these elements show what Sapir means by becoming “An Academic Space of Impact”: a regional academic institution that identifies students with technological talent, gives them access to engineering resources, knowledge, and mentorship, and provides a functioning pathway from the classroom to the market.
For the Western Negev, the significance goes far beyond the individual companies. The goal is to create a self-sustaining economic engine: one that attracts talent, keeps graduates in the region, strengthens local industries, and transforms academic excellence into long-term regional growth.
Noam Bedein is the director of Innovation Diplomacy & Strategic Partnerships for HaMitbah - Western Negev Innovation Authority.