Hey there! If you are reading this, or even if you aren’t, you are officially invited to the TLVBots community! What does that mean? Great question.

TLVBots is a brand new team of engineers based in Tel Aviv with the goal of building a vibrant community around intense robotics events, competitions, and so much more right here in start-up nation. We’ve decided to open with a bang: a robot fighting competition, open to all.

There’s really only one thing better than watching awesome robots built by incredible people face each other in a bout for a prize and the title of best robot, and that’s building the robot yourself. We’ve engineered the competition to make it easy and affordable to enter and build a robot with a chance to win. Our purpose in opening up this competition and hopefully many more in the near future is to address something of a problem we’ve seen in the way communities have been built in modern times. The internet is a great thing and it brings people together in unprecedented ways, but something the pandemic showed us is that the internet can never fully replace a real, concrete community. There are lots of very easy ways to get involved with robotics and engineering online, but if you really want a hands-on and immersive experience, it’s a lot harder to come by. We’re looking to bring the awesomeness of robotics to you in such a way that you can actually feel like a part of something real while gaining knowledge, experience, connections, skills, and an amazing time.

Who are we?

We are 15 bright young students of Torah Tech, a religious program for American high school graduates located in the heart of Tel Aviv. We all individually chose to journey thousands of kilometers from our homes to live in Tel Aviv, the high tech epicenter of the world, and work for tech companies in sectors ranging from blockchain development to self-driving cars. The program weaves Jewish learning and thought into an ambitious career development track, so we came here to accomplish. TLVBots is simply the manifestation of that desire. We are full of spirit, energy, and drive to achieve, which is exactly what brought each and every one of us here. We are anxious to share our experiences, excitement, and knowledge with a new community we hope will give us and many others so much more in return. We’ve been working hard already for the past few weeks and look forward to continuing to do so for the foreseeable future to ensure that this dream of ours becomes reality.

Why Tel Aviv?

In addition to being a massive hub for fostering tech startups and growing well-established companies, Tel Aviv is an awesome city to live in, which just makes us even more ecstatic to be creating a new community here. In fact, according to the World Happiness Report, Tel Aviv is among the top ten happiest cities in the world, ranking far above any other city in the Middle East in terms of how its citizens evaluate their own lives. I’m from New York City, so I’m used to living in a bustling urban center, but Tel Aviv just oozes a completely unique vibe. I’ve lived here for only two months and I can’t describe the sensations I get when I wade along the beach and gaze up at the skyscrapers other than to say that it just feels right. The fusion of a beach town rich with culture and a major city creates an incredibly unique and fun place to be with interesting people from all over the place. What a sick place to build robots, huh?

What can you look out for?

At the moment, our main focus is continuing to build up TLVBots from the ground up and developing our first-ever competition, the bot fight. We look forward to bringing you more content in the meantime, including updates on our progress and on the tech world in general. We encourage anyone remotely interested in anything TLVBots to fill out the contact form on our website and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. In the meantime, we continue to work diligently at developing rules for the competition, constructing a custom arena, setting up robotics workshops (some are already in the works right now!), and starting to design robots to compete in the competition. We are thrilled about what’s to come and can’t wait to welcome you all to TLVBots! BIG things are coming.