From Military Intelligence to Marketing Intelligence
Unit 8200 has a reputation that precedes most introductions. Israel's national signals intelligence unit is the training ground for a generation of tech founders - Check Point, Waze, Palo Alto Networks, CyberArk all count 8200 alumni among their ranks. The unit teaches its people to extract signal from noise at scale, under pressure, with incomplete information. That is also, more or less, a description of running a martech startup.
Eliashiv arrived at Onavo when the company was still figuring out what it was. He built out the research function, helping the startup understand how people actually used apps on their phones - behavioral data, usage patterns, the invisible layer beneath the download counts. It was infrastructure thinking applied to human behavior, and it suited him. When Facebook's acquisition interest became clear, the three co-founders saw the exit ramp coming and had already agreed they wanted to keep building.
The founding thesis for Singular was almost aggressively straightforward: marketers run campaigns across dozens of channels, the data from each channel lives in a separate dashboard, and nobody has a reliable way to see the full picture. Attribution exists, but it's fragmented and often estimated. Cost data doesn't match revenue data. Creative performance data is in yet another silo. Eliashiv's argument was that this was not a technology problem - it was a will-to-build problem. The data could be unified. The ROI picture could be made clear. Singular would be the platform that did it.
The company's early clients - gaming companies like Kabam, GREE, Storm8, and Big Fish - were among the most sophisticated mobile marketing operators in the world. They ran campaigns at scale, cared deeply about ROI, and had no tolerance for fuzzy attribution. Building for them first was a deliberate choice: prove the hardest case, then expand.
The 2018 merger with Apsalar was a turning point. Singular absorbed Apsalar's attribution capabilities, combining them with its existing analytics and cost aggregation tools into a more complete platform. The $30 million Series B that followed, led by Norwest Venture Partners, funded the expansion into enterprise markets. By 2019, Business Insider was naming Eliashiv one of the 22 most important executives shaping marketing technology - specifically noting that "every marketer wants to know how much of its advertising leads to a sale, and Singular says it has answers."
The privacy era reshaped the company's competitive context. Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework, the deprecation of mobile identifiers, and the rise of privacy-preserving measurement standards like SKAdNetwork created both a problem and an opportunity. Eliashiv responded by leading the Mobile Attribution Privacy Coalition, convening competitors alongside industry bodies to develop shared standards. It was the 8200 mindset applied to industry politics: when the rules of the game are changing, get in the room where the rules are being written.
Today, Singular's stack includes mobile attribution, web attribution, SKAdNetwork analytics, creative analytics, cost aggregation, audience management, and a growing AI layer that lets marketers query their data in natural language. Eliashiv's bet on AI is not decorative - Singular's 2025 integration with ChatGPT and Claude via MCP represents a genuine shift in how marketing data gets consumed. Not dashboards. Conversations. "Speed wins in marketing," he says. The platform he has built is increasingly built to prove it.