Elie Rubin and the business of staying connected

A bank is an unlikely place to reconnect. Most of its arrangements discourage conversation: the queue, the counter, the small matter of everyone wanting to leave. Yet in downtown Jerusalem in 2009, Elie Rubin ran into Dan Leubitz, a friend from their Betar youth movement days. They had not seen each other for roughly twenty years. Rubin was working on a project involving contact centers. Leubitz was looking for a new direction. Their reunion helped lead to Innitel.

The business would acquire two more names. First came Deskforce, then Squaretalk. Rubin stayed at the center as chief executive, with a problem that proved more durable than the branding: helping businesses communicate across distance without making distance the customer’s problem.

A career with several kinds of conversation

Rubin’s earlier working life moved through institutions that handle very different exchanges. He served in the Israel Defense Forces, worked as a senior commercial loan officer at Bank of Jerusalem, and became publisher and editor of IsraTimes. In banking, the exchange involved financing. In publishing, it involved an audience. Telecommunications would give him a third version: the machinery that lets two people reach each other in the first place.

His education also crosses borders. He studied at York University in Toronto, earning a BA, and completed an MBA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His public professional profile lists French, English and Hebrew at native or bilingual proficiency. For a founder selling communication across countries, that is a useful daily acquaintance with the distance between having something to say and being understood.

Squaretalk dates its founding to 2010. The bank encounter belongs to the prehistory, before the company’s current name and before outside financing. It gives the enterprise a pleasantly ordinary beginning: two people recognizing each other, asking about work, and discovering that there might be something to do together.

Before the dashboard, the disappearing hello

By 2015, Innitel was working with infrastructure provider Leaseweb. Beneath the sales language lay a set of unglamorous engineering concerns: latency, jitter, packet loss and overloaded servers. A communications company can promise all sorts of things. First, the sound has to arrive.

Leubitz, the technical cofounder, used the example of a greeting arriving out of order to explain jitter. Buffering then has to restore the sequence. Packet loss poses an even less sociable possibility: part of the greeting never arrives at all. Anyone who has repeated their name three times into a telephone has already attended the introductory seminar.

Rubin’s business depended on solving problems at that level while selling something customers could understand: calls that worked, capacity that could grow, and a service that did not require them to assemble the infrastructure themselves. The partnership put physical servers and network performance underneath the promise of a cloud service. Clouds, inconveniently for the metaphor, still need hardware.

Growth before the first investment

In November 2017, the company, by then called Deskforce, announced another appearance in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50. It reported revenue growth of 710 percent across 2013 to 2016. That is a historical measurement over a defined period, and a useful marker of how far the self-funded operation had traveled.

The product had also widened. Voice sat alongside chat, email and SMS, with connections into customer relationship management software. Rubin was discussing machine learning and the ambition to serve larger enterprise customers. The vocabulary sounds familiar today; the date matters. These ambitions were being articulated years before the current rush to attach AI to every available business process.

The next financing chapter arrived in April 2019. Deskforce announced a Series A from the US-based Cornerstone Venture Partners. It described the round as its first investment and the business as moving from a bootstrapped service operation toward a software-as-a-service model. At the time, it reported more than 10,000 daily global users.

The distinction matters in Rubin’s career. Selling a service and building a software product carry different demands. The financing announcement made that transition explicit. The money was intended to accelerate a change already visible in the product, from providing communications to supplying a platform around them.

The attraction of the glue

By June 2021, Rubin was explaining the Squaretalk name and a broader idea of the business. The company had more than 200 customer companies deployed globally, he said, with headquarters in Israel and a Bulgarian hub. Its integration work had acquired a memorable description: “intelligent glue.”

Glue is an unusually modest image for a technology executive to choose. It also describes a real nuisance. An agent may have a phone system in one place, customer information in another and a workflow somewhere else. Every handoff creates another opportunity to lose context. Squaretalk’s no-code integration product, Lynx, was meant to make those systems cooperate.

Rubin’s ambition was to make the company a hub for business application integration and automation. That expands the founder’s task considerably. A telephone connection is one thing to sell. Becoming the connective tissue between other companies’ products means persuading customers and partners that the joins will hold.

Later partnerships give that ambition a practical shape. A Firmao integration connects calling and communication history to its CRM. A LoopBridge collaboration links recorded calls to analysis of customer requests and product feedback. Each addresses a different gap between a conversation happening and the useful information from it reaching the next person.

International means the invoice, too

Rubin’s interest in crossing borders extends beyond the call itself. In a 2015 article on cross-cultural marketing, he wrote about the importance of understanding differences between audiences in a global market. A common channel does not guarantee a common interpretation. The recipient still brings a language, a context and a set of expectations.

The operational version of that problem appears in payments. Squaretalk’s collaboration with Payset addresses international billing through multi-currency accounts and payment services. Its CoinGate arrangement adds cryptocurrency as a customer payment option. These are less theatrical subjects than the future of conversation, but an international business has to collect its invoices as well as make its calls.

In the CoinGate case study, Rubin describes an arrangement that converts incoming cryptocurrency into euros immediately. The company says it avoids holding exposure to cryptocurrency price changes. Transactions are matched to invoices and recorded internally. Here, the interesting detail is the accounting design: a new payment route enters a familiar recordkeeping process.

That choice fits the recurring commercial problem in his work. Customers operate across borders; the systems underneath them have to accommodate different ways of doing things. Adding an option is useful only if the rest of the operation can handle what arrives through it.

More channels, more responsibility

In May 2025, Squaretalk announced a new platform combining contact management, AI-generated insights, reporting and customizable workflows. Rubin described an ambition to develop further into sales automation. The product direction put more of the work before and after a call inside the same environment.

A July announcement made WhatsApp’s integration into the omnichannel suite official. Rubin linked changing communication preferences to rising expectations around safety. The statement connects two obligations that can easily pull apart. A business wants to reach people in convenient ways; it also has to manage access, records and accountability.

“As communication preferences continue to shift, so do the safety expectations.”
Elie Rubin / July 2025

Squaretalk has announced controls including geographic and IP restrictions, session management and exportable access logs. It has also described AI-assisted identity verification and onboarding. These are company-described capabilities, with a straightforward purpose: making the communications platform responsible for more than delivering a message.

For Rubin, the expanding product creates an expanding burden of proof. Every added channel gives customers another reason to use the system and another process they must trust. An orderly audit log has little glamour. It becomes considerably more interesting when someone needs to reconstruct what happened.

A microphone joins the product line

By October 2026, Rubin was appearing in a different sort of business conversation. The first Squaretalk podcast paired him with Lawrence Tepperman, chief executive of Berkeley Payments. Their subjects included AI voice agents, customer communication and the demands of operating across languages.

The pairing brings the product discussion back to an operating customer. Tepperman’s company manages payment programs and contact centers. Questions about automation sit alongside the ordinary demands of keeping a service running. A podcast gives those questions room to become a conversation rather than a feature list.

Rubin also continues to put partnerships into the organization itself. In welcoming business development head Isaac Levy, he described channel relationships as a core part of the growth strategy. His work now involves a network of products, providers and customers, each with its own systems to connect.

The bank reunion makes a fitting opening because the later business keeps returning to a related practical question: how does one party reach another, and what happens next? Rubin’s company has changed names, funding arrangements and product scope. The work still begins at the point where somebody needs the person at the other end to understand them.