From building one of Israel’s early wedding-automation companies to joining HiBob’s founding team, leading R&D in Los Angeles and eventually launching igeo.ai, Orel Ohayon has spent more than 15 years at the intersection of software, automation, SaaS and digital marketing. Now, the 37-year-old Israeli entrepreneur is betting that AI Search will reshape the way consumers discover, evaluate and choose brands.
There are moments when entrepreneurs realize an industry is about to change.
For Orel Ohayon, founder and CEO of igeo.ai, that moment did not happen at a technology conference, in a boardroom or during a conversation with investors.
It happened when he watched his father use ChatGPT.
“My father was never a technology person,” Ohayon says. “He was the kind of person who barely knew how to use a computer. Then suddenly I saw him using ChatGPT on his phone every day, for almost everything he wanted to search for.”
For someone who had already spent years working across digital marketing, SaaS, cloud infrastructure and enterprise software, the significance was immediate.
“If my father changed the way he searches for information, this was no longer something only technology people were doing,” Ohayon says. “That was the moment I understood we were looking at a real consumer revolution.”
That realization would eventually become one of the foundations of igeo.ai, a company built around a simple but increasingly important question:
What happens to brands when consumers stop searching through lists of links and start asking AI which company they should choose?
An Entrepreneurial Journey That Started in Tel Aviv
Orel Ohayon was born in Tel Aviv and entered entrepreneurship shortly after completing his military service.
In 2010, he founded his first company, Power.
At the time, wedding guest confirmations and seating arrangements in Israel were still largely handled through phone calls, spreadsheets and manual processes.
Power set out to change that.
According to Ohayon, it was the first company in Israel focused on computerized wedding RSVP management and digital seating arrangements.
The concept may sound straightforward today, but the underlying idea would become a recurring theme throughout Ohayon’s career: identify a repetitive manual process and use technology to automate it.
Power operated for three years before being sold.
For Ohayon, the experience provided an early education in the complete startup lifecycle — building a product, finding customers, operating a company and eventually completing an exit.
But rather than staying within the events industry, he moved into a field that would become increasingly important to his future career.
Digital marketing.
Buying Polaris and Learning How Digital Demand Is Created
Following the sale of Power, Ohayon acquired Polaris Digital Marketing.
The move brought him deeper into the world of online acquisition, SEO, advertising, content and customer behavior.
But his approach to marketing was heavily influenced by his technical background.
Rather than treating digital marketing purely as a creative discipline, Ohayon became increasingly focused on the systems behind it: automation, measurement, software and data.
At Polaris, he developed tools and systems designed to improve digital marketing operations and began building deeper expertise in SaaS and cloud-based technologies.
It was here that two areas of his career started to merge.
Technology and marketing.
On one side were software, data, SaaS, automation and cloud infrastructure.
On the other were search behavior, acquisition, content, conversion and the question every marketer eventually has to answer:
How does a customer discover a business and decide to buy from it?
Years later, when generative AI began disrupting search, that combination would become particularly relevant.
Joining HiBob at the Beginning
One of the most significant chapters in Ohayon’s career came with HiBob, the Israeli HR technology company behind the Bob platform.
Ohayon was part of the company from its earliest days and says he joined as employee No. 2, remaining with the business from its founding until 2019.
HiBob would later grow into a global SaaS company and achieve unicorn status.
For Ohayon, however, the important experience came long before the unicorn headlines.
He was able to observe firsthand what it takes to build a global SaaS business almost from zero.
The experience included exposure to product development, infrastructure, international expansion and the challenges involved in building software that needs to support increasingly large and sophisticated customers.
It also reinforced a lesson that would influence his later companies: a technology product may begin locally, but the architecture, product strategy and ambition often need to be global from the beginning.
From Tel Aviv to Los Angeles
After leaving HiBob in 2019, Ohayon moved to Los Angeles.
There, he became VP of R&D at Studio Designer, a software company.
The move gave him another perspective on building technology companies.
This time, his role was centered on engineering leadership, software development and managing R&D within an American business environment.
Living in Los Angeles also deepened his familiarity with the U.S. technology market — a market that would later become central to igeo.ai’s growth strategy.
After years of entrepreneurship and startup-building in Israel, Ohayon was now experiencing technology from another side: managing product and engineering operations within the U.S.
Returning to the CEO Seat
In 2020, Ohayon returned to the CEO role, leading PWM, a software company specializing in cloud systems and technology solutions for enterprise customers.
He remained at PWM until the creation of igeo.ai.
Enterprise software introduced a different set of requirements.
Products designed for large organizations need to work inside complex environments. Scalability, integrations, security, reliability and organizational processes become just as important as individual features.
By this point in his career, Ohayon had accumulated experience across several different layers of the technology industry:
Automation.
Digital marketing.
SaaS.
Cloud computing.
Enterprise software.
Engineering leadership.
And startup building.
Then generative AI arrived.
The Question That Led to igeo.ai
As ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms began moving into the mainstream, most technology companies were asking how they could integrate AI into their existing products.
Ohayon became interested in a different question:
What happens when AI changes the way people search?
While advising an AI startup, Ohayon began researching the subject more deeply together with Dr. Amit Rachavy.
They studied how AI systems discover information, how they interpret online sources, how answers are generated and what influences which companies and products appear in those answers.
For Ohayon, the connection to his previous experience in digital marketing was immediate.
For more than two decades, an enormous part of the digital marketing industry had been built around search engines.
A customer had a question.
They searched Google.
Google presented a page of results.
Companies competed for rankings, clicks and traffic.
SEO became a massive industry because where a company appeared on that page could directly influence revenue.
Generative AI changes that interaction.
A user can now ask:
“What are the best cybersecurity platforms for a mid-sized financial company?”
Or:
“Which HR software is best for a 500-person European SaaS company?”
Instead of receiving ten blue links and conducting all the research manually, the user may receive a synthesized answer containing only a handful of companies.
AI can summarize the market.
Compare vendors.
Explain strengths and weaknesses.
And increasingly, recommend what the user should evaluate next.
For marketers, that represents a fundamental change.
When His Father Started Using ChatGPT
Despite the research, the moment that convinced Ohayon the shift had moved beyond the technology industry came from much closer to home.
His father began using ChatGPT.
Constantly.
“My father is basically the opposite of an early adopter,” Ohayon says. “Technology was never natural for him. Suddenly, whenever he wanted information, he was asking ChatGPT from his phone.”
That was the signal Ohayon had been looking for.
“If this behavior reached him, then it had reached the mass market.”
The implication was much bigger than ChatGPT itself.
If the interface people use to discover information changes, the marketing industry built around that discovery process also has to change.
That insight eventually became igeo.ai.
What Is igeo.ai?
igeo.ai was founded in Cyprus, with its development center in Israel.
The company operates in the emerging category of AI Brand Performance and describes its platform as Agentic Brand Performance for AI Search.
The goal is to help companies understand and improve how AI engines perceive their brands throughout the buyer journey.
That means examining questions such as:
How does ChatGPT describe the company?
Which competitors are recommended alongside it?
What evidence does AI use when evaluating the brand?
Which websites and sources influence those answers?
Does Gemini understand the company’s positioning correctly?
Is Claude recommending the company when customers ask relevant commercial questions?
Where does Perplexity direct users?
And ultimately, does AI discovery generate traffic, leads and revenue?
The premise behind igeo.ai is that simply being mentioned is not enough.
The company wants brands to understand whether they are being understood, positioned, validated and recommended correctly.
From AI Visibility to Measurable Pipeline
Traditional analytics tools were built around websites.
They can tell a marketing team how many users arrived, which campaign generated a click and whether a visitor converted.
But the AI buyer journey can begin long before a person ever visits the company’s website.
A potential buyer may conduct a significant part of the research inside ChatGPT or another AI platform.
The user may ask AI which vendors exist.
Then ask for a comparison.
Then ask which product is best for their industry.
Then ask about pricing or reputation.
By the time the person visits a website, much of the decision-making process may have already happened.
That is why igeo.ai’s current positioning focuses on turning AI-driven buyer journeys into measurable pipeline.
The platform combines monitoring, analytics, gap analysis, recommendations and AI agents designed to help organizations move from understanding what AI says to taking action.
AI Performance, Not Just Another Dashboard
Ohayon believes one of the biggest limitations of modern business software is that companies have accumulated too many dashboards.
A dashboard can identify a problem.
It does not necessarily solve it.
igeo.ai is being built around a different model.
First, the system identifies how AI currently represents a business.
It can analyze areas such as positioning, competitors, citations, sources, sentiment and the pages being surfaced in AI answers.
Then it compares that reality with how the company wants to be understood commercially.
That process exposes gaps.
Perhaps AI understands the product category but fails to recognize a major differentiator.
Perhaps competitors have stronger third-party evidence.
Perhaps the company is missing comparison content.
Perhaps an important product claim exists internally but is not supported clearly enough online.
The next step is action.
igeo.ai can recommend specific interventions and use AI agents to help create and execute the required work across owned content, social channels, communities and other sources.
The company operates with a human-in-the-loop model: actions can be proposed and prepared by AI, but nothing is published without human approval.
The customer can approve, reject or request changes.
Raising $1 Million From Two Angel Investors
igeo.ai raised $1 million in a pre-seed round backed by two angel investors.
The company has since expanded its activity across the United States, Europe and Israel.
According to igeo.ai, its platform is now used by thousands of professionals across marketing, product, technology and agency teams.
The company’s customer base includes public companies, high-growth technology businesses and unicorns.
Customers named by the company include Nayax, Firebolt.io, TradeStation, Cluch.co, CTERA, Pharmbills and Polymarket.
The variety of those companies is important to Ohayon’s thesis.
AI Search is not a problem limited to one industry.
A fintech company, a cloud infrastructure provider, a data company or a professional services business may operate in completely different markets, but they increasingly share the same challenge:
Their customers are using AI to understand those markets.
“Visibility Is One Thing. Recommendation Is Everything.”
For Ohayon, one of the biggest mistakes in the emerging AI Search industry is focusing only on visibility.
A company can appear in an AI response and still lose the customer.
AI might mention the company but position a competitor as the better option.
It might cite the brand without recommending it.
It might misunderstand what the company actually sells.
Or it may exclude the brand from the final shortlist entirely.
“Visibility is one thing. Recommendation is everything,” Ohayon says.
That distinction sits at the heart of the igeo.ai strategy.
In traditional search, companies compete for rankings and clicks.
In AI Search, they may increasingly compete for something more consequential:
Being included in the answer.
A New Digital Footprint for Brands
AI Search also changes what companies need to optimize.
For years, brands treated their corporate website as the center of their digital presence.
Advertising drove users to it.
SEO optimized it.
Content lived on it.
Conversions were measured on it.
AI systems, however, can build their understanding from a much wider information environment.
That can include company websites, editorial publications, social media, review platforms, YouTube, communities, Reddit discussions, comparison pages and other third-party sources.
This means AI Brand Performance is not simply about optimizing a homepage.
It is about understanding the complete digital evidence surrounding a company.
For marketing and communications teams, that changes the scope of the job.
PR becomes relevant to AI Search.
Product marketing becomes relevant.
Social media becomes relevant.
Content becomes relevant.
Brand positioning becomes relevant.
Even the way companies structure claims and supporting evidence online can influence how AI systems understand them.
Why AI Search Is Becoming a C-Suite Issue
Ohayon believes AI Search will eventually extend far beyond SEO departments.
The reasoning is straightforward.
If AI platforms influence how customers evaluate companies, multiple teams need to understand what is happening.
CMOs need visibility into brand perception.
Product marketing teams need to know which capabilities customers are comparing.
Sales teams need to know which competitors repeatedly appear alongside them.
PR teams need to know which external publications and sources influence AI answers.
Executives need to understand whether AI discovery is generating business.
That is why igeo.ai is attempting to build what Ohayon sees as a broader AI Performance layer rather than another search-ranking product.
Building a Global AI Company From Cyprus
The geography of igeo.ai is also unusual.
The company was established in Cyprus, while maintaining its development operation in Israel.
Ohayon now lives in Cyprus and sees the country as part of the company’s identity.
His ambition is not modest.
“My vision is for igeo.ai to become the first unicorn to grow out of Cyprus,” he says.
And that is not the final milestone he has in mind.
“One day I want us to be at Nasdaq, pressing the button. You have to aim as high as possible.”
Ohayon says the long-term ambition is to make igeo.ai the leading AI Performance company globally and eventually serve companies across the Fortune 500.
The company’s initial $1 million angel-backed round and early enterprise customer base represent the first stage of that plan.
Entrepreneurship Is Like Training in the Gym
When asked how he thinks about entrepreneurship, Ohayon reaches for an analogy that has little to do with software.
The gym.
He has been training since he was 14 years old.
“Entrepreneurship reminds me a lot of training,” he says. “You don’t go to the gym once and suddenly become strong. It is the ability to keep going.”
For Ohayon, the important trait is not avoiding problems.
It is continuing through them.
“There are always going to be obstacles. There are injuries. Things happen. The point is to continue moving forward, keep developing, keep learning and not stop.”
His own career has followed that pattern.
Power taught him automation and entrepreneurship.
Polaris connected technology with digital marketing.
HiBob exposed him to global SaaS.
Studio Designer strengthened his experience in engineering leadership.
PWM deepened his understanding of enterprise software and cloud infrastructure.
And igeo.ai combines many of those experiences inside one company.
Life Beyond the Startup
Ohayon describes startup life as intense.
He says his schedule can reach around 16 hours of work a day, six days a week.
At the same time, he tries to maintain a healthy lifestyle and continue making room for sport.
He lives in Cyprus with his partner, plays tennis and has recently added golf to the list.
Competition and sport have always been a part of his personality, and he sees a direct relationship between physical training and company-building.
Both require patience.
Both involve setbacks.
And both reward consistency over time.
The Next Battle for Digital Marketing
For more than two decades, one of the defining battles of the internet economy has been the fight for the first page of Google.
Companies spent billions trying to rank above competitors at the exact moment customers searched.
AI does not eliminate that battle.
But it creates another one.
If a buyer asks an AI assistant which software company, financial platform or service provider they should choose, the system may not give them ten links.
It may give them three names.
Perhaps only one.
In that environment, being ranked No. 11 is no longer necessarily the biggest risk.
The bigger risk is not being part of the answer at all.
Ohayon believes that shift will create an entirely new layer of the marketing technology industry.
And he is building igeo.ai around the assumption that brands will eventually manage their AI performance with the same seriousness that they manage search rankings, paid advertising and conversion today.
From his first startup in Tel Aviv in 2010, through an exit, digital marketing, HiBob, Los Angeles, enterprise software and now AI Search, one idea appears repeatedly throughout Ohayon’s career:
Identify where behavior is changing, then build technology around what comes next.
Today, that bet is igeo.ai.
And if Ohayon’s long-term vision becomes reality, the journey that started with computerized wedding confirmations in Israel could eventually end on a much bigger stage — with a global AI company built from Cyprus and, one day, the Nasdaq opening bell.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Orel Ohayon?
Orel Ohayon is an Israeli technology entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of igeo.ai. His career includes founding Power, acquiring Polaris Digital Marketing, being part of HiBob’s early founding team, serving as VP R&D at Studio Designer in Los Angeles and leading enterprise software company PWM.
What is igeo.ai?
igeo.ai is an AI Brand Performance platform designed to help organizations understand, measure and improve how AI engines perceive, cite, position and recommend their brands throughout AI-driven buyer journeys.
What AI platforms does igeo.ai focus on?
The company focuses on major AI answer and search environments including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google AI experiences.
How much funding has igeo.ai raised?
According to the company, igeo.ai raised $1 million in its pre-seed round from two angel investors.
Where is igeo.ai based?
igeo.ai was founded in Cyprus and operates a development center in Israel. The company serves customers across the United States, Europe and Israel.
Who uses igeo.ai?
The company says its platform serves thousands of CMOs, marketers, agencies, product managers and technology professionals. Customers named by igeo.ai include Nayax, Firebolt.io, TradeStation, Cluch.co, CTERA, Pharmbills and Polymarket.
What is Orel Ohayon’s long-term vision for igeo.ai?
Ohayon’s stated ambition is to build igeo.ai into a global leader in AI Performance, become the first unicorn to emerge from Cyprus, work with companies across the Fortune 500 and ultimately take the company public on Nasdaq.
