Izhar Shay
Chairman of the Board
Izhar Shay serves as Chairman of our board of directors. Mr. Shay currently serves as a venture partner at Disruptive AI, an early stage venture capital firm focused on AI investments. He also is the Chairman of Kendago, a leading digital marketing household and is on the Board of Directors of Aquarius Engine (TASE: AQUA, Developer of a Two Sided Free Piston Linear Engine), Tastewise (an AI based consumer insights platform for Food & Beverage innovation) and Spiritt (a Generative AI platform for automated no-code development of smartphone applications). From 2020 to 2021, Mr. Shay was Israel’s Minister of Science and Technology. Prior to that Mr. Shay’s professional career included various management and business positions in the Israeli high-tech and venture capital sectors. Previously, he worked as a high-tech entrepreneur and managed a number of companies for nearly ten years in the United States. In 1998, he co-founded Business Layers, a developer of Identity Management software solutions, and served as the company’s CEO until its sale in 2003 to Netegrity (Nasdaq: NETE). From 2004-2005, Mr. Shay served as chairman and CEO of V-Secure Technologies, a developer of Intrusion Prevention products intended to block cyber attacks, which he led through its sale to Radware (NASDAQ: RDWR). In 2006, he joined the international venture capital fund Canaan Partners as a partner and managed its investment activities in Israel until 2014. At that time, Canaan Partners had assets under management of approximately $2.0B. Together with his partner, Ehud Levy, he co-founded Canaan Partners Israel in 2014, which made investments in Israeli technology start- ups, focusing on investments in mobile, digital media, Internet, communications and software. He served as a director at LiveU (acquired by Francisco Partners), Viewbix (acquired by Algomizer), Rollout.io, Drupe, and RegulusX and served as a director at Prime Sense prior to its sale to Apple as well as at N-trig, which was sold to Microsoft. In 2015, Mr. Shay was selected by the Israeli media outlet Geektime to be on the list of the 100 most influential people in the Israeli high-tech. Mr. Shay was elected as a member of the Israeli parliament, where he served from 2019 to 2021. He was a member of the special Coronavirus Cabinet, which was formed by the Israeli government, where he helped lead the national efforts confronting the challenges of the Covid19 pandemic.