BIRD is an acronym for Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development. The BIRD Foundation’s mission is to stimulate, promote and support industrial R&D of mutual benefit to the U.S. and Israel.
The BIRD Foundation was established by the U.S. and Israeli governments in 1977 to generate mutually beneficial cooperation between U.S. and Israeli companies, including start-ups and established organizations. BIRD provides both matchmaking support between U.S. and Israeli companies, as well as funding covering up to 50 percent of project development costs, up to $1M per project. BIRD takes no equity in the companies.
BIRD’s scope extends to Agriculture, Communications, Construction Technologies, Electronics, Electro-optics, Life Sciences, Software, Homeland Security, Renewable and Alternative Energy and other technology sectors.
BIRD supports approximately 25 projects annually. The cumulative sales of products developed through BIRD projects have exceeded $10 billion.
Since its inception in 1977, BIRD has approved around 1000 projects with leading companies in the U.S., for example: ADM, American Red Cross, Applied Materials, Avaya, Bayer Pharmaceutical, Becton Dickinson, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Eastman Kodak, General Dynamics, General Electric, Guidant, IBM, J&J, KLA- Tencor, Molex, Motorola, Procter & Gamble, SanDisk, Spansion, Telcordia, Texas Instruments, Tyco and many others. See http://projectsdb.birdf.com for a complete database of BIRD projects.
In addition, BIRD operates on behalf of the Innovation Authority and other Israeli government ministries and US Departments (DoE, DHS) dedicated funding tracks (Bird Energy and Bird First Responders).
For more information:http://www.birdf.com