Ramot at Tel Aviv University — Israel's Third Major University Tech-Transfer Office

Ramot at Tel Aviv University Ltd. was founded in 1973 as the exclusive technology-transfer company of Tel Aviv University (TAU), wholly owned by the university, and handles its patenting, licensing and startup-formation activity. TAU's own site credits Ramot with more than 5,000 patent applications covering over 1,300 inventions, and reports the university ranked 66th globally and 1st in Israel for US patents granted in 2018, with 37 US patents registered that year through Ramot.
Ramot cites over 100 start-up companies formed from TAU intellectual property, and an independently reported example is the flash-storage patent filed by Ramot in 2004 and licensed to M-Systems around a year later — M-Systems was later acquired by SanDisk for $1.55 billion. Ramot's venture arm, the Momentum Fund, raised $23.5 million in 2014 from investors including Singapore's Temasek and India's Tata Group (each committing at least $5 million) plus SanDisk, financing named startups including QArt Medical, Unispectral, Trobix, Multivu and Silib.
The office has not been free of legal friction: in 2022, Cisco filed for declaratory non-infringement against Ramot's newly issued US Patent 11,342,998 the same day it was granted, and Ramot counter-sued for infringement; in November 2024 a US federal judge in Delaware ruled several of the patent's claims indefinite — a partial win for Cisco — while other claims survived. No independent academic or governmental evaluation specifically assessing Ramot's model (as distinct from Israel's broader university tech-transfer sector, which also includes Hebrew University's Yissum and the Weizmann Institute's Yeda) was located.

Read the full analysis: https://ramot.org/about-ramot/