"Orcam" is laying off 62 employees and startup "Antidote" is firing half of it's workers

The Orcam company founded by Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram is laying off 62 employees, most of them in Israel. The company, which was founded in 2010, distributed hearing letters before layoffs to 62 employees, who make up 16% of the company in Israel. The company did not respond.
Recently, the company underwent a significant change when Amnon Shashua, one of the founders of the company, stepped down from the position of CEO and transferred the position to Elad Zarfati, who worked with him at Mobileye. Zarfati led a significant reorganization plan as part of a response to changes in world markets.
The company's products are used in 40 countries and are available in 25 languages. Rani Hagg was the CEO of the company until recently, he retired a few months ago.
To date, Orcam has raised over 100 million dollars at a value of 1.5 billion dollars. Among the investors on the side of Shashua and Aviram are also Leumi Partners, Harel, and Kell.
The product developed by Orcam, which is supposed to help those with visual impairments, blindness, and reading difficulties, recently received great exposure with the fact that the soccer player Leo Messi became the company's ambassador. In this framework, Messi met with visually impaired people and gave them the device developed by the company - MyEye PRO. The technology allows users to read texts, recognize faces, bills, and colors and even shop, and lead a more independent lifestyle. Orcam's vision is that in the future the device will become a kind of personal assistant, based on machine vision and artificial intelligence, with the goal of enabling independent conduct for those with disabilities.
There are also problems with the start-up Antidote, which developed a virtual health fund for the American market. He is laying off about half of his employees in Israel and moving to focus only on the USA. Antidote currently has about 60 employees, of which 40 are in Israel, most of them in research and development. Following the layoffs, only about 17 employees will remain in Israel. In addition, the company employs about 100 doctors who provide medical services in the fields of Mental health, primary and emergency medicine, blood pressure, and soon also women's medicine and diabetes.
The company's virtual health fund, which raised $22 million in March of this year and in August made NBA star Yanis Andacompo its presenter, is used by tens of millions of Americans who are uninsured or underinsured. The American healthcare market, which is expected to cross the $4 trillion mark this year, has reached its current state in light of the existing structural separation between the medical service providers and the insurance companies. The HMO model unites these two parts and thus creates uniformity of interests between the patient, the health system and the insurer.
The company was founded in 2020 by CEO Avihai Soderi, who previously led innovation and business development at Leumit Health Fund, and also served as CEO of Vectis in the field of medical insurance, which was sold to Re-Swiss
 in 2019. Karin Bell Feder, the VP of Technologies, is an officer and former commander in the field of cyber in 8200; Dr. David Zlotnik, who serves as the chief physician, has a rich past and expertise in providing remote medicine services and managing large medical teams, and the serial entrepreneur Ben Anoush serves as the company's president and chairman .
The layoffs in Israeli high-tech are not very large, but recruitment of new employees has been frozen and many young people are in a state of job search.