A visitor builds an animal out of LEGO. Software examines the shape and recognizes what the visitor has made. The bricks enter a digital world, and a piece of artificial intelligence earns its keep by understanding a small act of imagination. In 2018, Galia Rosen Schwarz was helping explain this experiment. It is an unexpected place to begin the story of a chief executive. It is also a useful one.
The installation was called Animaker. Developed for The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, it brought together Resonai, the company where Schwarz was vice president of business development, with artists, educators and 3D-scanning specialists. Visitors could explore the relationship between physical construction and digital play without the usual equipment getting between them and the experience. A LEGO animal is a demanding customer: it cannot be persuaded to look more like a giraffe for the convenience of the software.
Schwarz described the system’s ability to read geometry and structure. The playful setting gave an abstract technical capability a visible purpose. People could see what recognition meant because they had made the thing being recognized. Her part in that project offers an early glimpse of a recurring commercial challenge: helping people understand what a technology allows them to do.
A strategy researcher meets the market
Schwarz now runs C8 Health, the company she co-founded in 2022. Before that, her work moved between academic inquiry and business development, between asking how organizations innovate and helping companies find markets for what they had built. These are neighboring occupations, though the daily routines look rather different. A scholarly model can wait for revision. A prospective customer usually has another meeting.
Her education crossed three disciplines. At the Technion, she earned a BSc in Biotechnology Engineering and a PhD in Strategy. At Tel Aviv University, she earned an MBA in Finance. Engineering asks whether a system can work; finance examines the resources behind it; strategy considers the choices available to the organization. Taken together, the qualifications make an unusually apt reading list for someone whose later job would include building a business around complex software.
Her academic work looked at research and development in technology firms. A conference abstract with Zur Shapira proposed examining how performance feedback and available resources influenced R&D spending and innovation. It specified a sample of 600 publicly traded American technology firms across 11 industries. That is a substantial distance from the familiar founder anecdote in which a single frustrating afternoon supplies all the market research a company supposedly needs.
The abstract’s questions were about organizational behavior. What happens when performance falls short of expectations? How do comparisons influence investment? What difference do spare resources make? These questions leave room for several explanations of the same decision. A company may be protecting itself, chasing an ambition or responding to a rival. The expenditure alone does not tell the whole story.
Schwarz also co-authored Prospect Theory and Strategic Decision-Making with Shapira for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management. She served as a visiting research professor at NYU Stern. These connections place a documented academic chapter beside her commercial work. Reading the career as a whole, it is reasonable to see a continuing interest in the decisions that sit between an available technology and an organization’s willingness to adopt it.
A building that knows where you are
At Resonai, Schwarz worked on another version of the problem introduced by the LEGO exhibit: giving software an understanding of the physical world. This time, the world was a building. The company’s Vera platform used computer vision to create a digital representation of a space, opening possibilities for applications that understood their surroundings.
In a 2020 video conversation, she explained two pieces of the technology. One separated an environment into individual objects. Another recognized and searched 3D objects by their geometry and structure. The distinction matters. A digital floor plan may show where a room sits. An application that understands the objects inside it can do something more specific when a person points a device at one of them.
The commercial possibilities were correspondingly practical: managing spaces, helping people navigate them and creating applications suited to the place in which they were being used. Schwarz discussed the building’s entire lifecycle, a larger ambition than supplying a novel effect on a phone screen. Software could become part of how a place was operated.
Her writing about augmented reality made that ambition concrete. A digital concierge could help visitors find their way. A digital twin could make some work possible without an on-site visit. Virtual interfaces could connect a person to a physical device. The building was still a building, with all the ordinary obligations of running one. The technology’s value depended on how well it served those obligations.
There is something appealingly prosaic about that territory. Much of a building’s life consists of tasks that nobody notices until they go wrong. An elevator, a maintenance request, a visitor trying to find the correct room: each is a small test of whether the systems around people make sense. An impressive demonstration has to survive those less theatrical encounters.
By February 2021, Schwarz was discussing work with companies in Japan and Korea and interest in using digital twins from a building’s design through its daily operation. In another conversation that year, she described maintenance reporting in which a photograph could identify a location and an object, then initiate a ticket with repair instructions. The attraction was easy to understand: fewer steps between noticing a problem and getting the information needed to handle it.
Her discussion of adoption also touched on perceived cost. She described a gap between what facilities managers thought deploying such platforms would cost and the actual expense. It is a familiar commercial obstacle, and an instructive one. A technical team may have solved an engineering problem while the buyer is still solving a different problem in their head.
The person with the budget
Schwarz’s wider career included senior roles at SymphonyAI and Compugen, alongside work in startups and larger companies. When she described her background in 2024, her starting point was plain: “My background is in business.” She emphasized creating markets and building products. The simplicity of that answer gives the career a useful center of gravity. Her work has repeatedly involved the passage from capability to commercial use.
Founding C8 Health brought a different set of responsibilities. She was now helping build the organization itself, with fellow founders Ido Zamberg and Tzach Klo. The work included finding customers, learning what they valued and deciding how a small company should approach much larger institutions. There are plenty of ways to describe such work in a presentation. Eventually someone has to decide which conversation to have next.
Her March 2026 BUILDERS appearance described a department-level approach to sales: enter through a smaller part of an organization, establish use there and preserve a route to wider expansion. The episode also recounted two unpaid pilots that produced more than 20 qualified opportunities at a single conference. Both details put customer experience ahead of a grand introduction to the whole enterprise.
One conference, as described in her March 2026 BUILDERS appearance. Opportunities are prospective sales, not completed deals.
Another lesson concerned language. The benefits a founder emphasized were different from the benefits internal champions emphasized to their peers. That distinction is useful well beyond one company. The person working with a product and the person defending its purchase may share an enthusiasm while needing different explanations for it.
The episode’s attention to measurement fits that practical view of growth. Following a contact through qualification, an opportunity and a completed sale gives each stage a separate question. Interest alone can be flattering. A pipeline requires enough detail to reveal where the interest stops. For someone who studied organizational decisions, those pauses ought to be interesting evidence.
What she can intentionally shape
Schwarz has offered a direct account of her priorities as a CEO. In a public reflection on company building, she wrote: “As a startup CEO, success by design means focusing on what I can intentionally shape.” Her list included the team, investors and thinkers around the company, validating customer value, measurement and processes that would allow disciplined expansion. The statement is revealing for its emphasis on choices that can be worked on.
The funding chapter made those choices more consequential. In 2025, C8 Health announced a $12 million Series A led by Team8, with 10D and Vertex Ventures Israel participating. Disclosed funding reached $18 million. Money provides room to hire and develop a product. It also gives management more decisions to make, and more ways for an organization to become complicated.
Schwarz’s public profile has grown alongside the company. She received a Bronze Stevie Award in 2025 and appeared at number 36 in TechRound’s February 2026 Women in Startups & Tech list. In that feature, she reported that women made up half of management and 40 percent of the workforce. Those figures describe the company she was building as well as the role she occupied within it.
“This recognition belongs to our entire team.”Galia Rosen Schwarz, September 2025
Return to the LEGO animal, and the earlier episode takes on another meaning. A visitor could encounter sophisticated software through an action they already understood: making something with their hands. Schwarz’s later work has involved different customers and different stakes, but her career keeps returning to the distance between what a system can do and how a person encounters it. At C8 Health, she is responsible for the company that has to cross that distance, one product decision, one team decision and one purchasing conversation at a time.