Eran Haggiag and the Art of Getting Everyone on the Line

Eran Haggiag has spent a fair portion of his working life dealing with what happens after something apparently simple. A video advertisement plays. A phone call connects. A customer logs in. On the screen, the event takes a moment. Behind it, companies need to agree on what happened, who authorized it and who owes whom. Haggiag keeps finding businesses in that gap between the effortless surface and the contractual plumbing.

His current company, Glide Identity, brings him to the login screen. Its proposition draws on the SIM or eSIM already associated with a mobile subscription, using carrier infrastructure to help authenticate a user. The prospect is attractive: fewer codes to wait for, read and type. The founder’s particular qualification is less obvious. He has already spent years trying to get telecommunications companies to work together.

A bench, then a billing problem

One account of how that education began features the least glamorous piece of startup furniture imaginable: a bench. In mid-2017, Haggiag and Gal Hochberg were sitting together discussing the growing interest in cryptocurrencies. Hochberg later recalled Haggiag describing a peculiarity of his advertising businesses. Almost everything was digital, except the commercial interactions with partners.

That observation gave the conversation somewhere practical to go. Could cryptography help digitize business relationships while preserving the privacy those relationships required? The question helped lead to Clear, later known as ClearX. Rather than begin with a token in search of a purpose, their discussion concerned a piece of business machinery that still needed considerable human attention.

Telecommunications supplied a particularly intricate version of the problem. An international call can involve several operators, even though the caller has a relationship with only one. Contracts connect the companies behind the connection. When their records disagree, someone must work out why.

In February 2020, Haggiag explained this using the call on which he was being interviewed. He was in Tel Aviv; the reporter was in London. Their conversation, he pointed out, could travel through several countries’ networks. The sound arrived promptly. The accounting could be considerably less brisk. A disputed invoice might send people into a line-by-line comparison of records.

In a separate discussion of cross-border payments, he described the density of those relationships: operators maintain agreements covering products, usage and conditional pricing with many other providers. Each individual agreement may be comprehensible. The difficulty grows when hundreds of them have to coexist. An ordinary phone call can leave behind an extraordinary administrative afterlife.

Clear’s approach used shared contractual logic and confidential data handling to automate reconciliation and settlement. By July 2020, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Vodafone had used its technology for roaming discount agreements. Haggiag’s explanations emphasized the same tension that had surfaced on the bench: companies wanted coordination, while retaining control of commercially sensitive information.

A career in the machinery

He had arrived at that question through several industries. His published biography describes a childhood interest in programming and a professional start as a developer at 16. In 2001, he joined software consultancy AlphaCSP. Work with IDI Direct Insurance included serving as CTO. The path then ran through Pegasus Smart Trading, an algorithmic trading venture founded with Barak Capital.

By 2014, he was co-founding Meme Video, an algorithmic media technology company that was subsequently acquired by Somoto. He also co-founded performance-marketing business Whitenoise. Trading, insurance and advertising make a varied calling card. They also put a software builder close to money, measurement and the consequences of systems disagreeing.

His conference biography has also listed him as a member of JFrog’s advisory board. These roles offer a more useful account of his background than an all-purpose founder label. He has occupied technical and executive seats, built products and dealt with the commercial arrangements around them. The move into telecom settlement extended that work into an industry whose relationships span borders by necessity.

The chip had already been delivered

The connection between ClearX and Glide is more than a similarity in their customers. Google Cloud has described Glide as ClearX’s API spinoff. In its discussion of network API distribution, Google placed Glide among the aggregators helping make carrier capabilities accessible to developers.

That description gets to the commercial task. A carrier possesses useful capabilities inside its network. An application developer wants to use them without negotiating a separate technical experience for every operator. An aggregator occupies the space between those needs. Open Gateway and related API standards provide a framework for making the networks easier to work with.

For Haggiag, the SIM offered a way into a different question: how to establish trust when someone signs in. His argument begins with an existing distribution achievement. Mobile networks have already placed cryptographic hardware in billions of people’s phones. Glide seeks to put that installed infrastructure to another use.

There is an appealing economy to the idea. A customer already has a device and a mobile subscription. A developer already needs to verify access. The missing piece is a reliable way to connect those facts through the organizations that control them. Explaining the opportunity takes much less time than assembling the participants.

“All you need to do is just to convince a hundred telcos to implement what’s needed and contract with you.”

Eran Haggiag

Three minutes on stage, years on the phone

By Mobile World Congress 2025, Glide had announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud and a demonstration involving Google Cloud, T-Mobile and Telefónica. The planned demonstration concerned Firebase phone-number verification, offering SIM-based cryptography as an alternative to a delivered one-time code.

That lineup is a concise explanation of the founder’s day job. The application platform, the operator and the company connecting them all have to participate. A working demonstration depends on more than a plausible slide about authentication. Each organization has its own technology, business priorities and approval process.

In October 2025, Glide announced a Series A exceeding $20 million, led by Crosspoint Capital Partners, with participation from Amigos Venture Capital, Singtel Innov8 and Sir Ronald Cohen. The announcement put total company funding above $25 million. Those are company financing figures. Their relevance to Haggiag’s story lies in the resources and relationships required to pursue the plan.

Then came a shorter format. On March 23, 2026, he pitched Glide at the RSAC Innovation Sandbox, whose finalists receive three minutes to present. Compressing a business built around multiple industries into that interval is its own exercise in coordination. The appearance put the company’s identity proposition before a cybersecurity audience accustomed to hearing promises about easier, safer access.

The permission slip for an agent

Haggiag’s ambitions extend beyond a person reaching an account. In an April 2026 CyberBytes conversation, he described a related question for AI agents: how can a merchant know that a real person authorized software to act? His proposed answer involves cryptographic proof carrying the authority granted by the human.

The details he discussed included spending limits and the scope of an instruction. Those details make the idea intelligible. Asking an agent to buy something is a familiar delegation problem with a new intermediary. The merchant needs an answer about permission; the person needs limits that survive the handoff. Haggiag sees SIM-backed trust as a potential starting point.

In June, he also described a broader identity architecture involving reusable credentials. He distinguished phone-number authentication from richer identity verification and discussed future agent identities. These remain ambitions to evaluate alongside the products actually announced. They explain where he wants the company to go, rather than supplying a tally of what it has already delivered.

The rectangles behind the magic

The more immediate milestone arrived in 2026 with Glide’s announced MagicalAuth beta across AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, covering iOS and Android. Its June Google Cloud API beta also named Telefónica, MASORANGE and EnStream. The operator names are consequential because this business depends on coverage and participation, not simply a clever interaction on one device.

Haggiag’s public account of carrier coordination included meetings, debugging, legal agreements, approvals and video calls crowded with participants. It is an unusually recognizable description of infrastructure work. Anyone who has tried to arrange one meeting across several companies can supply the comic timing.

He has also made room for smaller jokes. After an appearance at Bloomberg’s television studio with Verizon Business executive Scott M. Lawrence, he reported a decision that required no carrier integration at all: he had declined the offered lipstick. Even a conversation about cryptographic authentication has to pass through makeup.

The combination suits the story his career tells. He can describe an expansive identity system, then return to the people whose cooperation makes a limited version possible. His work keeps bringing him to the boundary between software and agreement. On one side sits the experience the customer wants. On the other sit the organizations that must make it happen. Haggiag has chosen, repeatedly, to work on the connection.