Joel Bar-El had a small translation problem. Trax, the retail technology company he co-founded, processed photographs of shop shelves. Charging customers for each image seemed reasonable. The machines did the work; the images generated the cost. Yet the people buying the service organized their budgets around something else entirely: a visit to a store.
So Trax changed the unit on the bill. A store visit was something a customer could recognize, budget for and compare with an existing expense. The same technical work became easier to purchase. It is an unusually revealing episode in a career often described through funding announcements. Even a computer-vision company sometimes needs to see things from the other side of the desk.
Bar-El now runs Swish Basket, bringing cameras and sensors to basketball. The connection with Trax is easy to miss if one concentrates on the merchandise. Groceries have given way to jump shots. The underlying interest remains: take activity in the physical world, make it readable, and give someone a reason to care about the result.
A short trip with a long sequel
Singapore first entered his working life as an assignment. At Mint, a financial software company, he was sent there to install a system. The expected six months became four years. He married there; his first son was born there. An overseas posting had acquired the inconvenient permanence of an actual life.
His corporate work took him into SunGard, overseeing Asia-Pacific business and later operations in North America. Before Trax, he also co-founded Tersus Software and led the wealth-management software company Sentryi, which was sold to IRESS. These were businesses in which technical work had to survive the purchasing habits of institutions. A functioning product still needed a route into an organization.
His academic starting point was physics at Tel Aviv University. The subsequent career moved toward software and the business of getting it used. At Tersus, he worked on global sales channels and marketing. At SunGard, he carried regional responsibility for business performance. Technology and the arrangements around technology were already sharing the same job description.
Trax brought those strands together. Bar-El and Dror Feldheim founded it in Singapore in 2010. Feldheim supplied experience in retail execution; Bar-El brought the technical background. The question was pleasingly concrete. Brands could deliver their products to shops, but how could they reliably know what happened once those products reached the shelf?
The customer worth waiting for
A shelf looks straightforward until someone has to audit it. Product position, availability, price and promotional execution all matter. A manufacturer may have paid for space without possessing a current, dependable picture of that space. The aisle contains information that looks obvious to a passing shopper and becomes troublesome when multiplied across a business.
Trax used image recognition to turn pictures into information about products and their surroundings. Bar-El described the intended gain as both less time spent auditing and more data captured. The point was to let companies examine what was actually happening in stores. A photograph could become part of an operating system for decisions.
The founders deliberately sought large multinational customers early. That choice imposed a long wait. Trax began at the end of 2010; its first recurring customer arrived in mid-2013. Bar-El identified that customer as Coca-Cola. The appeal of a substantial reference was obvious. The time required to secure one was rather less comfortable.
The geographic arrangement was deliberate too: headquarters in Singapore, research and development in Tel Aviv. Bar-El explained the research decision in terms of available computer-vision expertise. Early financing came from private individuals and family offices. He considered that capital better suited to the time the company needed before a large customer committed.
During the pilot years, there were several kinds of persuasion to complete. The technology had to work consistently. Field teams had to change routines. The person testing the system might be different from the person approving the budget. Each successful demonstration still had to travel through the customer’s organization before it became a commercial decision.
That is why the first recurring contract mattered beyond its revenue. The Australian Coca-Cola relationship helped create credibility for further business. Software founders are encouraged to move quickly; their customers may have rather elaborate reasons for standing still. Trax had to make the move feel worthwhile to everyone involved.
When the numbers change their meaning
By April 2021, Trax was announcing a $640 million Series E. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and funds managed by BlackRock led the round; OMERS and Sony Innovation Fund by IGV also participated. The transaction included primary and secondary capital. Some money financed the business; some bought shares from existing holders. The distinction matters when imagining what a financing headline puts in a company’s bank account.
There was a leadership change that year as well. Justin Behar became CEO and Bar-El moved to executive chairman, concentrating on strategy, innovation and the longer view. A company built around recognizing products had reached the point where its own organization needed a different arrangement.
Bar-El’s public explanations of startup finance have a dry edge. Discussing annual recurring revenue, he observed that multiplying a growing company’s latest month by twelve can produce a more attractive number than its actual annual sales. He also described how later investors examine claims, customers and accounts much more closely. “They want proof,” he said.
“They want proof.”
Joel Bar-El, on later-stage investors
He advised preparing the company’s records for a possible sale from the beginning and treating an IPO as a milestone with obligations beyond the listing. The attention to accounting sits comfortably beside the camera technology. There are limits to what a persuasive presentation can do when someone starts opening the files.
In 2022, the environment changed. Trax cut roughly 100 jobs. Bar-El explained that the company had emphasized revenue growth, including product lines with weaker profitability. As capital became less accessible, it changed the plan and reduced its workforce. The earlier funding did not remove the need to decide which activities could justify their costs.
Those decisions belong beside the growth story. A shelf-recognition system can make a customer’s operations more visible; the company selling it still has to examine its own. Bar-El spoke about the reality of lost jobs while explaining the shift toward a business organized for the conditions at hand.
In May 2024, he and Feldheim announced they would leave daily operations while remaining on the board. A further change arrived in February 2026, when Gemspring announced the acquisition and combination of Trax’s image-recognition business with FORM. The deal joined shelf intelligence with frontline workflows. It concerned the image-recognition business, a distinction that keeps the company’s history from being squeezed into an overly simple ending.
A camera above the hoop
Bar-El’s interests had already extended into another physical problem. In 2023, he became chairman of 1MRobotics, the logistics automation company later known as Xpand. Robotics offered a different way to change how retail work happened. The connection was still to places where products, people and operational routines meet.
Swish takes him to the basketball court. Its sensor sits above the backboard, combining cameras, LiDAR and computer vision. The platform is designed to identify players, collect information about play and attach it to individual profiles. An app adds analysis, challenges and a way to connect activity across courts.
The company’s stated ambition is broad access to tools for measuring and improving performance. There is a familiar ambition underneath it: make a physical setting understandable through data. A shelf has prices and product positions. A court has players and shots. Both ask a technical system to recognize what is happening before it can offer anything useful.
Swish’s product approach, from the backboard to the app.
The NBA selected Swish Basket for its 2026 Launchpad cohort, a program that lets emerging technology companies develop and test their work with the league. The selection gave Bar-El’s next company a recognizable institutional connection early in its life. At Trax, a large first customer had been a deliberate objective. The resemblance is hard to miss.
In August 2026, Swish announced $3.2 million in pre-seed funding led by Aristagora VC. The company said it had installations in five locations across Europe, Asia and the United States. It planned to use the money for commercial installations, engineering and US marketing. These are the practical tasks of another beginning, however familiar the founder may be with them.
Five days for the next founder
Alongside the new company, Bar-El has made room for the Bar-El Center. Its five-day founder program emphasizes decisions, practical tools and a community that continues beyond the session. In his public writing, he connects the work to avoiding mistakes and helping entrepreneurs recover a clear sense of what they are trying to build.
He has also recalled a fundraising meeting in which he raised $5 million in a minute. His explanation emphasized the team and company culture behind the conversation. The minute makes a good anecdote. The years of preparation are the part another founder might be able to use.
There is a consistent commercial discipline running through his advice: find a problem substantial enough that a customer will pay to solve it. It explains the store-visit invoice, the patient pursuit of recurring business and the insistence on clear explanations. The next court installation will bring another opportunity to test it. A camera can collect a great deal. Someone still has to make the information worth buying.