At Harvard Business School, Oded Eran worked on a conference about economic cooperation, then sat down with Sari, a Palestinian entrepreneur from the West Bank. They imagined businesses Israelis and Palestinians might build together. An ordinary drink became a conversation about an extraordinary possibility: people who had encountered one another through conflict could become collaborators.
Eran had arrived at that conversation by a difficult route. A week before leaving Israel for business school, he was a reserve captain in a tank in Gaza. Six months separated the two scenes. In his account, the distance between them supplied a purpose: business leaders should help communities prosper when governments struggle to find agreement. The ambition was cooperation through practical work.
Today, the Boston-based co-founder and chief executive of Connie Health is working on a different problem of human connection. His company pairs technology with local agents. As its acquisition count grows and its software becomes more sophisticated, Eran keeps returning to the people involved. There is something pleasingly inconvenient about a technology executive who insists that the conversation still matters.
A career in the machinery of getting things done
Before the chief executive title came a succession of jobs with decidedly workmanlike names. Operations planner. Product manager for new product introduction. Manager of sales and operations planning. At Applied Materials, where he worked from 2010 to 2014, Eran moved through roles concerned with making a complicated organization function.
Those titles have a certain resistance to glamour. A new product has to enter production. Plans have to meet demand. Different parts of a business have to agree about what happens next. For a future founder, this is useful territory: the place where an appealing idea acquires dependencies, deadlines and somebody else's spreadsheet.
Eran earned a BSc at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev before attending Harvard Business School from 2014 to 2016. His MBA years included a technical product management internship at Amazon in the summer of 2015. After graduation, he took an operations and product management role at 2020 Onsite, then moved into strategy and operations at Iora Health in 2017.
The progression gives his entrepreneurial career a particular texture. Product work and operating work sit alongside each other. The eventual company would require both: software that could organize information and an organization that could make software useful to people. Reading his career backward, it is tempting to make everything look inevitable. The job titles support a more modest observation. He had spent years dealing with execution before becoming responsible for the whole enterprise.
Three founders, and a grandmother's name
Eran founded Connie Health in 2019 with David Luna and Michael Scopa. The three had previously worked at Iora. Their shared experience gave them a starting point that was already social: colleagues choosing to build something together, with different responsibilities inside the new business.
The company's name came from Scopa's maternal grandmother, Connie Francis. It is a small piece of family history sitting inside a venture-backed company. Corporate naming can sound like a committee trying to invent a Latin word before lunch. Here, a grandmother supplied the answer.
That choice suits a business which makes relationships part of its operating model. Connie's published values include results, initiative and putting relationships first. Those are company commitments, rather than a personality test for its CEO. But they establish the terms on which Eran has chosen to present the organization: judge the work by what it does for people, and expect the relationship to continue.
He and Luna appeared together on Valley Business Radio in November 2020, during the company's early Arizona period. By then, the founding partnership had become a public working partnership, with the chief executive and his fellow founder explaining their venture in the same interview. The company story has always had more than one person at the microphone.
“And it's sold by humans, with human empathy and human connections.”
Oded Eran, September 2026
The expensive question of staying personal
In July 2021, Connie announced a $13 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures and Pitango Healthtech. Together with an earlier $3 million seed round, the announcement put total funding at $16 million. The company was expanding from Arizona into Texas, with further expansion planned.
The investors included people who had built companies themselves. Assaf Wand, the co-founder of Hippo, participated, as did Flatiron co-founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg. For Eran, the early funding placed his venture in a network of institutional investors and experienced operators. The money came with a recognizable entrepreneurial audience.
Already, the company described AI as something paired with local expertise. That detail matters to the chronology. Human interaction appeared in the early description of the business, years before Eran's more recent comments about AI and retention. His position has an operating history behind it.
Expansion creates a practical question for that position. A local relationship involves someone knowing whom to call and having a reason to call again. As a business adds territories, employees and customers, the systems behind that familiarity become more consequential. Growth gives the promise a larger audience. It also gives the promise more opportunities to fail.
Acquisition number ten
On June 18, 2026, Connie announced the completed acquisition and integration of Clearlink's relevant insurance business. The company counted it as its tenth completed acquisition. It also disclosed a $40 million Series B led by HealthQuest Capital, bringing its reported total funding to $85 million.
The announcement described the financing as having been led the previous year. June was the date of the public announcement, a useful distinction when reading a company's financial milestones. A funding headline compresses a process into a day; operating a business rarely follows such a tidy calendar.
Eran put infrastructure at the center of his explanation of the deal. His emphasis was the ability to bring a large book of business onto Connie's platform while preserving personal service. The acquisition was presented as a test of the machinery the team had already built.
Ten acquisitions make integration a recurring management responsibility. Each completed deal adds work to the organization responsible for delivering the original promise. For a founder whose earlier career included planning and operations, this is familiar terrain at a different scale. Signing the agreement supplies an occasion for a photograph. Making the combined business function supplies the following morning's agenda.
Clearlink marked Connie's tenth, according to its June 2026 announcement.
The customer has to come back
By September 2026, Eran was expressing his position on AI in unusually plain commercial language. He connected human empathy and human relationships to retention, warning that businesses seeking to replace people with AI would lose something valuable in the process.
Retention gives the argument teeth. It moves the discussion beyond whether a customer can complete a transaction. The question becomes whether that person has a reason to stay. A fast interaction may be useful; a continuing relationship asks for more. Eran's argument puts that longer period inside the business calculation.
It is also a demanding argument for the chief executive making it. Connie describes itself as AI-native and has raised capital to expand. Preserving the role of people means building technology around their work, then managing the organization that supports them. The human part remains a responsibility on the company's books.
Seen this way, his stance belongs to an operator's debate about where to put effort. Software can carry more information into a conversation. The person taking part still has to listen, explain and earn another conversation. Eran has chosen to make that combination central to his company's identity.
In his public response to the Clearlink milestone, Eran directed thanks toward the team, independent agent partners and investors. His LinkedIn activity also includes sharing engineering recruitment posts. These are ordinary parts of a founder's public work, but they help fill out the picture around the financing figures. The company depends on people writing and maintaining its systems as well as people using those systems in conversations. Keeping that work connected is part of the chief executive's job. The operating model he describes has to make sense to both groups, every working day.
Back on campus, with work to explain
In early 2024, Eran shared his enthusiasm about returning to Harvard for a founders' careers panel. The announced participants included Goldcast's Palash Soni, Thoropass's Sam Li and Smarty's Denzil Eden. For students considering a founder's path, Eran could bring a history that included industrial operations, a product internship and several years of company building.
There is an appealing circularity to that return. Business school had been the setting for his account of a conversation across a political divide. Years later, he was returning as a founder invited to discuss a working business. The early aspiration and the later career belong to different settings, but both leave room for a person on the other side of the table.
His current work supplies a concrete question to take back into any classroom: how does a business grow while keeping its relationships useful? The answer has to survive acquisitions, software changes and the daily work of a larger team. Eran's company has money behind its attempt. His own public argument supplies the standard by which to watch it: people should still have a reason to return.