Avihai Sodri and the Trouble with Simple Ideas

Ask a chief executive about a mentor and there is usually a name waiting in the wings. A former boss. A professor. Someone who delivered a useful sentence at precisely the right moment. Avihai Sodri offered a different answer. He credited the entire team at Antidote, giving the people around him a role usually reserved for one influential figure.

It is an appealingly inconvenient choice. A single mentor can be thanked in a speech. A team has to be listened to again on Monday. Sodri said he admired how his colleagues worked through challenges while holding to their values. The answer places the daily business of working together near the centre of his account of himself.

He is the co-founder and CEO of Antidote Health, a company established in 2020. The title puts him at the front of the organisation. His answer about mentorship puts him among its people. There is a useful tension there, particularly for a founder whose company has experienced both fresh investment and painful reductions.

Sodri's public career offers a story about becoming responsible for an idea after other people have agreed to join it. Customers arrive. Investors write cheques. Colleagues organise their working lives around the enterprise. A straightforward ambition acquires a payroll, a budget and a calendar. Simplicity begins to require quite a lot of administration.

“The best mentor I ever had was not one individual but the whole team at Antidote.”

Avihai Sodri · 2024

An apprenticeship in the machinery

Sodri grew up in Israel. Before founding Antidote, he worked in insurance and business development at Leumit Health Services, then led Vectis Claims Services. His earlier experience was inside established operations, where a business must keep functioning while its managers try to improve it.

He was CEO of Vectis from 2016 to 2019. In his account of that period, he helped establish and lead it as a Munich Re subsidiary. Vectis was subsequently acquired by Swiss Re in 2019. These are substantial institutions to have in the background of a future startup founder: the vocabulary includes claims, pricing and responsibility, alongside opportunity.

His professional education also contains a wonderfully unromantic detail. In March 2017, he completed a Munich Re workshop covering reinsurance programmes, pricing and solvency. Solvency rarely gets the starring role in a founder's origin story. It does have the advantage of remaining useful after the launch party.

The sequence matters. By the time Sodri became a co-founder, he had already been a chief executive. Founding would add a different kind of ownership to familiar managerial responsibilities. He would have to help choose the people, persuade the backers and establish the organisation whose decisions he would then be expected to lead.

Four people enter the picture

Antidote's founding group brought Sodri together with Carine Belle-Feder, David Zlotnick and Ben Enosh. Their backgrounds crossed technology, professional practice and entrepreneurship. Sodri took the chief executive role; the enterprise began with several kinds of expertise around the table.

A photograph of the four captures a more sociable version of company formation than the solemn founder portrait. Sodri, at the right, is laughing. The group is crowded together, with hands meeting near the centre. It is a company photograph, of course, but it supplies a welcome reminder that an organisation begins as people agreeing to work with one another.

The business launched its consumer service in January 2021. By August, it announced a $12 million seed round led by iAngels, Well-Tech Ventures and Flint Capital. The venture now had institutional backing and an operating service. The founding conversation had become something that strangers could use and investors could examine.

A public launch supplies a particularly firm deadline. An internal idea can remain promising for months; a service in use attracts questions immediately. The chief executive's role expands with it. The same organisation that needs a persuasive explanation also needs a reliable answer when somebody asks what happens next.

The cheque and the calendar

In March 2022, Antidote announced a $22 million Series A led by iAngels, Group 11 and Flint Capital. The announcement identified iAngels as a third-time investor. Alongside new capital, there was a continuing relationship with people who had already backed the business.

The stated uses of the money included expansion in the United States and further research and development. For Sodri, the funding meant resources to pursue a larger operation. A financing announcement is also a statement about future work: people will have to be hired, projects selected and spending justified.

Seven months later, Antidote confirmed layoffs. Reporting put the reduction at about a third of the workforce, with most cuts in research and development. The company's explanation pointed to economic and market conditions and adjustments to staffing and other expenses.

Both dates belong in Sodri's story. March brought investment. October brought a smaller workforce. The juxtaposition is uncomfortable, as it should be. Money raised does not settle every subsequent decision about how much a company can spend. Nor does a continuing ambition remove the consequences for the people whose jobs end.

There is no need to invent a private scene in the chief executive's office to understand the pressure in that sequence. The public record already contains the change. The founder who speaks of learning from a team also leads an organisation that has had to reduce one. That is part of the responsibility attached to the title.

A very recognisable new colleague

Between the funding announcement and the staffing cuts came a different sort of attention. In August 2022, Giannis Antetokounmpo became an Antidote investor and brand ambassador. The Milwaukee Bucks player brought an audience accustomed to following him on a court into contact with a young company.

For a chief executive, an investor who is also an ambassador occupies an unusual position. Capital and public recognition arrive through the same relationship. A name familiar to basketball followers can give a business an introduction that would otherwise require a lengthy explanation.

Antidote's announcement connected the partnership to Antetokounmpo's background and the company's stated values. It gave the association a personal rationale beyond celebrity. Sodri and his fellow founders now had a prominent public ally whose own story was already familiar to many people.

The contrast with Sodri's earlier career is rather good. Reinsurance workshops and an NBA ambassador inhabit different corners of professional life. Both appear in the history of the same chief executive. The route from running Vectis to co-founding Antidote had widened his circle of relationships considerably.

The basketball connection makes an arresting detail. The nearby dates keep it in proportion. An ambassador joined in August; staffing cuts followed in October. Public attention and operational difficulty can occupy the same year, even the same quarter. A founder's calendar has room for both.

A founder who keeps the wheel

Sodri has also made a habit of explaining the business in public. His appearances include the Empowered Patient Podcast in 2022 and Google's Ads & Tech Podcast in March 2023. The latter conversation, hosted by Einat Nitzan, addressed entering a large American market in the presence of established competitors.

That is a recognisable founder's problem even without the particulars of his industry. A large market offers resources and demand, alongside well-funded organisations already occupying it. Getting into the market requires a view of where a smaller company can be useful and an explanation that other people can follow.

One phrase from his 2022 podcast appearance is strikingly restrained: “we're not reinventing the wheel.” It leaves room for familiar processes and accumulated experience. There is a modesty in the wording that suits someone who arrived at founding through years of managing existing operations.

The wheel has suffered terribly in startup conversation. It is forever being reinvented by people who have yet to drive anywhere. Sodri's formulation offers it a brief rest. His earlier work gives that restraint some context: claims administration, business development and running a subsidiary all involve systems that already have users and obligations.

His public roles extend to writing. CEOWORLD lists him as an opinion columnist as well as a chief executive. Speaking, writing and managing put different demands on a founder. An explanation has to fit into an interview; an organisation has to keep working after the interview ends.

“we’re not reinventing the wheel”

Avihai Sodri · podcast appearance, 2022

The work after the announcement

In December 2024, Antidote announced the initial closing of another $22 million funding round. Existing backers named in coverage included WellTech Ventures, iAngels, Flint Capital, Group 11 and Antetokounmpo. The company remained connected to a network assembled over several years.

Its New York headquarters and research operation in Israel also gave Sodri a business spanning two countries. His own public professional profile places him in New York. The company he leads retains a link with the country where he grew up and built his earlier career.

By October 2026, the calendar contained another expansion announcement, this time into Texas and Georgia for the following year. The announcement is a useful place to leave a founder's story open. A new territory is both an achievement to announce and another collection of tasks to carry out.

Sodri's story has accumulated the ingredients of a conspicuous entrepreneurial career: co-founders, successive financing rounds, an international operation and a famous investor. It also contains the ordinary managerial subjects that rarely fit into a celebratory photograph. Staffing levels. Expenditure. Continuing relationships. Who gets heard when a decision is difficult.

Return to his choice of mentor. The team was the answer. That gives the cheerful founding photograph a little more weight. These were people building something together, with all the practical obligations that would follow. The CEO stands on the right, laughing. The work belongs to the group.