Hani Goldstein

Building a company that says thank you

Hani Goldstein runs a company whose entire purpose is to make a person feel appreciated when they open a box. As co-founder and chief executive of Snappy, she has spent the past decade turning that soft idea into hard infrastructure: software that lets a company send a gift, let the recipient pick what they actually want, and handle the fulfillment behind the scenes. It sounds modest. In practice it has become the way a large share of the Fortune 100 - names like Microsoft, Zoom, Comcast and Uber - handle the everyday work of recognition.

Today Snappy has delivered more than six million gifts and works with over 3,000 enterprise customers. The company is split across two hubs, with headquarters in New York and a research-and-development office in Tel Aviv, reflecting the Israeli roots Goldstein shares with her co-founder and chief technology officer, Dvir Cohen. What began in 2015 as a consumer app has grown into a Series D business that has raised roughly $130 million, most recently a $25 million round led by Qumra Capital in 2024.

The current chapter is about expansion. In early 2025 Snappy acquired Covver, a corporate merchandise company, folding branded swag and AI-driven personalization into a platform that had mostly been about individual gifts. The logic is straightforward: if a company already trusts Snappy to handle its employee anniversaries and client thank-yous, it may as well trust it for the branded jacket handed out at the sales kickoff. Goldstein has framed the whole enterprise around a two-word operating principle she repeats often - "do good" - and built a product roadmap that treats gratitude as something worth scaling.

A gift is not a gift card

Ask Goldstein why Snappy exists and she tends to draw a line between two things that look similar and feel completely different. A cash reward, even a gift card, is a transaction - money moving from one account to another. A gift is a moment. That distinction is not marketing filler; it is the product thesis. Snappy leans on personalization and, crucially, recipient choice: rather than guessing what someone wants, the sender picks a collection and the recipient selects the item that fits. The result is meant to feel less like a payroll line item and more like being seen.

That framing also explains why corporate customers, not consumers, became the core business. Snappy started life as a personal gifting app, but by 2017 Goldstein and Cohen had pivoted toward companies, where the pain of recognizing employees and clients at scale was real and recurring. Human-resources teams needed a repeatable way to mark work anniversaries, celebrate milestones and welcome new hires. Sales and marketing teams wanted a way to break through to prospects that did not feel like another cold email. Snappy sat neatly in the middle.

Even as the enterprise business grew, Goldstein kept the doors open on the edges of the market. Snappy launched a consumer personal gifting platform in 2022, letting individuals send the same kind of choose-your-own gift they might receive from an employer, and introduced a lighter-weight product aimed at smaller businesses that wanted the polish of enterprise gifting without the enterprise overhead. The through-line across all of it is the unwrapping moment - the small piece of theater when a recipient sees a gift arrive, opens a digital reveal and gets to choose. Snappy treats that moment as the product, and everything else - logistics, fulfillment, integrations with HR and sales systems - as the machinery that makes it possible.

Two founders, two continents

Snappy has always been a two-country company. Goldstein leads from New York, where the business relocated after its San Francisco beginnings, while the engineering heart of the operation sits in Tel Aviv under Cohen, who ran operations and software teams at Israel's Prime Minister's Office before co-founding the company. The split is not incidental. It gives Snappy an Israeli startup's engineering culture and an American enterprise's commercial reach, and it put the company on lists like Forbes' "10 Most Promising Young Israeli Startups in New York" early in its life. Running product and R&D across an ocean is a management challenge most founders would avoid; Goldstein has made it a structural advantage.

The partnership between the two founders has anchored the company through every stage. Cohen builds the technology that makes personalization and choice work at volume; Goldstein sets the direction and carries the story to customers and investors. It is a division of labor that has survived a decade, four funding rounds and a pivot - the kind of durable founding relationship that is rarer than the pitch decks suggest.

Ship first, perfect later

Goldstein is candid about how she learned to build. Before Snappy launched, she spent what she now considers far too long chasing perfection - roughly 25 iterations of a consumer gifting app, refined and re-refined before real users ever touched it. The lesson stuck, and she repeats it to other founders as a warning: do not delay the launch, and do not burn time, energy and money trying to reach a version that feels finished. Get the product live, then let user feedback do the work that no amount of internal polishing can.

She is equally specific about mentorship. Goldstein credits a rotating set of advisors across different stages of the company, and argues that the value of a mentor depends on whether they understand the phase a business is actually in. Advice that fits a scrappy pre-launch startup can be actively wrong for a company managing a national sales team, and vice versa. Her guidance to founders is to match advisors to the moment - and, when disruption is the goal, to balance that outside counsel against their own instincts.

Her wider playbook for shaking up an industry comes down to a handful of habits she has described publicly: stay aware, positive and realistic through the inevitable ups and downs; treat failure as survivable and use it as a launching pad; model the behavior you want to see, which in Snappy's case means demonstrating gratitude and joy rather than just selling it; seek advice but trust your gut; and, above all, launch fast. None of these are exotic, and that is rather the point. Goldstein's edge is not a secret framework but the discipline to keep applying simple principles while a business grows complicated around her.

Resilience, tested

Not every part of the Snappy story is upward. The company grew quickly through the pandemic-era boom in remote work, when distributed teams suddenly needed new ways to feel connected and appreciated. When that market cooled, Snappy felt it. In early 2023 the company reduced its workforce by around 100 people, and its 2024 Series D came at roughly a $200 million valuation - a markdown from its earlier peak. Goldstein has spoken about resilience less as a slogan than as a practiced skill: the ability to treat a setback as a launching pad rather than an ending, and to keep the team steady through the swings that come with building anything ambitious.

Her instinct in good moments is telling too. When she was named to Inc. Magazine's Female Founders 100 list, her first move was to hand the credit to her team, calling the honor something to share with everyone at Snappy who works to "spread smiles through the power of kindness and giving." It is a small gesture that maps neatly onto the company she built - one where the point is to make other people feel valued.

Gratitude, at scale

The Covver acquisition reads as a bet on that same idea in a new form. Branded merchandise - the jackets, water bottles and welcome kits companies hand out - has long been a fragmented, unglamorous corner of corporate spending. By adding AI-driven personalization to it, Goldstein is trying to make swag feel less like generic promotional junk and more like a considered gift. If Snappy can bring the same recipient-choice logic to merchandise that it brought to individual gifting, it turns a commodity category into something closer to the company's core mission: making the person on the receiving end feel thought about.

What Goldstein is ultimately chasing is a change in default behavior - making appreciation a routine, built-in part of how organizations treat the people around them rather than an afterthought reserved for big occasions. Snappy's partnership with Make-A-Wish, which helped raise around $1 million toward more than 100 children's wishes, sits comfortably inside that worldview. So does the "do good" mantra she keeps returning to. For a founder in enterprise software, it is an unusually plain north star, and it has held up across a decade of funding rounds, a pivot, a boom, a contraction and an acquisition. Ten years in, Hani Goldstein is still betting that the simplest human gesture - saying thank you, and meaning it - is a business worth building.