Management Team

Mr. Dotan Borenstein
CBO
Dotan is the Chief Business Officer at Lavie Bio. Previously he served as the CEO of Salicrop, an early stage AgTech startup. Prior to Salicrop, Dotan was VP Business Development at Hutchison Kinrot technological Incubator in Israel, a CK Hutchison Holdings company. Earlier Dotan served in the Israeli Air Force as a pilot and was responsible for establishing and managing the IAF’s joint international training programs.
Dotan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Bar Ilan University and an MBA from HEC in Paris, France

Dor Kestecher
VP Business Development
Dor is the VP of Business Development at Lavie Bio. Previously he served as Head of Insecticides at ADAMA, a leading global Agrochemicals company. Prior to ADAMA, Dor was the R&D Planner for South-East Europe at Syngenta.
Dor holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Plant Science from the Hebrew University and an MBA from the Recanati School of Management at Tel-Aviv University.

Michael Ionescu, PhD
VP Research
Michael Ionescu is the VP Research of Lavie-Bio. For the last 6 years, Michael has lead the research and optimization activities of novel microbiome-based ag-biological to drive food quality, agriculture productivity and sustainability.
Michael received his PhD degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Life Sciences and Environmental Studies, researching stress response mechanisms in enteric bacteria. He had conducted his postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley in phytopathology, studying cell-cell communication systems in plant pathogens with relation to interaction with host plant.

Mr. Amir Bercovitz
VP development
Amir is leading the development activities at Lavie Bio. Previously, Amir served as the operations and Formulation manager for Agrogreen (Minrav), later aquired by Bayer, and as formulation manager for Ecogen Il. Since 1990, Mr. Bercovitz has been involved in the development and production of microbial based products, mainly biopesticides based on live microorganisms - including commercially available Bionematicides (BioNem, Flocter, Nortica, Votivo) and Biofungicides (Aspire, AQ-10, Shemer).
Mr. Bercovitz holds an MSc. Degree in Microbiology from the Hebrew university, Jerusalem

Russ Putland
Vice President Commercial
Russ is the Vice President Commercial of Lavie-Bio. Russ brings more than 30 years of experience within large multinational agriculture companies. In his last leadership role, he led a sales organization at DuPont crop protection.