We’re excited to announce $2.5 Million in fundraising from a number of esteemed investors and foundations. This incredible support will help us with the development of upcoming training programs and our new funding model for Fellows students that enables them to join a course at no up-front costs. Read more about our initiatives below!
Announcing the Drahi Campus
The Patrick & Lina Drahi Foundation (PLFA) donated $1.5M to support all of ITC’s innovative projects for the upcoming years. We’re excited to be partnering with The Patrick & Lina Drahi Foundation and to rename the ITC Campus, located on 18 Shoken street in Tel Aviv, as the ITC Drahi Campus.
We’re planning several exciting changes to the campus itself to ensure we can accommodate our growing student base. ITC’s cohorts have been systematically growing since 2014, but we’re now being constrained by the physical limitations of our space. We’re excited to announce that in the second half of 2019, we will be adding two floors and open a new cafeteria on the ground floor.
Growing the Israeli pie: making talent the true equalizer
As Start-Up Nation Central announced in the 2018 report on Human Capital, the number of Israelis working in the high tech sector has stayed under 10% for the last 5 years, even if the industry has significantly developed. One of the reasons for this gap? The number of Computer Science and Engineering university graduates has remained stagnant until 2016, leading to a growing demand within a booming industry. Today, this translates to 31% of the open positions in Israel being in software engineering specialties like DevOps, front-end and back-end, as well as data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, but not enough talented engineers to fill them.
Seed the Dream Foundation, a private grant-making foundation committed to fostering meaningful educational opportunities for people of all ages, has allocated a grant to ITC to allow us to invest in as many talented students as possible (200+ per year), focusing specifically in underrepresented backgrounds in Israel – Women, Arab-Israelis and Haredis.
Removing Financial Barriers
Based on a strong belief that education should be accessible to everyone, The Paul E. Singer Foundation and Marc Rowan Family Foundation have also donated to ITC to support upcoming projects. These investments will allow students from all socio-economic backgrounds to join our Fellows program without paying tuition up-front, through an Income Shared Agreement (ISA).
Only if and when students are successful (once they are gainfully employed and earning above a meaningful salary in the sector), they are asked to pay the tuition back as a percentage of their income. Apart from removing up-front tuition, these investments will help remove financial barriers for students from all nationalities through multiple scholarship opportunities.
Allowing more women to lean in
To encourage women’s involvement in tech, Cheryl Saban’s non-profit, The Self-Worth Foundation for Women and Girls has allocated a significant grant to ITC. Saban shared some words on what it means to be partnering with ITC.
“The Self-Worth Foundation strongly believes that education is essential to closing the gender gap. The ITC Fellows Program provides the perfect opportunity for women’s advancement in the global tech industry. We cannot wait to see the amazing things these women accomplish!”
We’ve already granted 5 scholarships to women in the 2019 Fellows Data Science program and are excited to empower more women to join this exciting adventure.
Developing new professional tracks
These new investments will enable us to continue running our flagship programs – Data Science & Machine Learning, Cyber Security & Advanced Programming, Design Verification for Hardware, and our Coding Bootcamp. In 2019-2020, we aim to expand our tracks to additional in-demand skills based on the industry needs and close collaboration with our 120+ partner companies.
About ITC:
Israel Tech Challenge was founded to address an industry-wide shortage of tech talent by enabling selected professionals of all age and background to train and work in the most sought-after technical positions in the tech industry. ITC’s secret sauce is the ability to identify potential in talent from all over the world with a focus on under represented minorities and offering a unique, intensive and elite training program modeled after IDF’s 8200 intelligence units and designed in close partnership with the world’s leading tech companies.