Omri Yoffe and the Art of Changing Course

At eleven, Omri Yoffe had a gardening business called Greenpeace. His territory was the gardens around his moshav, an Israeli rural community. The name suggests a boy already comfortable with ambition; the work required something less glamorous. Gardens need tending again. A promising name will get you only so far with a customer whose hedge remains untrimmed.

Years later, Yoffe would build companies in aerospace, help develop consumer electronics, and become founder and CEO of Vi, an enterprise artificial intelligence company. The distance between those occupations is considerable. Yet the first business offers a useful way into the others: choose a job, make yourself useful, return tomorrow. Even a company selling intelligence eventually has to deliver the equivalent of a tidy garden.

Asked what he would tell his younger self, he chose four words: “Always forward, no regrets.” Taken literally, that sounds like an instruction never to look back. His career suggests a more interesting reading. You can keep moving while changing your destination. Sometimes, changing your destination is how you keep moving.

A cockpit before a company

Yoffe served in the Israeli Air Force from 2000 to 2008. His early résumé identifies him as a major and an Apache Longbow pilot. Aviation gave him a professional life before entrepreneurship gave him another. It is tempting to make every subsequent business decision sound like a cockpit maneuver. The temptation should be resisted. A customer meeting does not become a combat sortie because someone brings a particularly aggressive spreadsheet.

What does carry across is an interest in advanced technology. Yoffe founded the aerospace businesses Clear Cut and C4. He also pursued management education, completing the Kellogg-Recanati international executive MBA program in 2009-2011, then joining Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program in 2011. His route crossed operating experience, business study, and an environment explicitly interested in large technological problems.

At Singularity, his team earned the opportunity to work with NASA personnel, including astronaut Yvonne Cagle. They developed a prototype over the three-month program. It was an apprenticeship in the demands of an aerospace environment, where noise and motion make an apparently straightforward measurement difficult. A laboratory demonstration and something that works in motion are different engineering assignments.

The commercial lesson was equally practical. To make a consumer product, the team had to revisit its design and its cost. Specifications suitable for aerospace could not simply be handed to a shopper with a larger price tag. Engineering had to make room for manufacturing and affordability. Yoffe’s move toward the consumer market began with that negotiation between what technology can do and what a customer will buy.

When the computer spoke back

LifeBEAM, which Yoffe co-founded with Zvika Orron, put that commercial ambition into hardware. The company’s early consumer work included a connected cycling helmet and a sports cap. It adapted technology to objects people were already wearing. By 2014, its products communicated with other devices through Bluetooth or ANT+, placing the company inside an emerging network of connected consumer equipment.

That detail matters because hardware companies do not operate alone. Their products have to cooperate with phones, software, and accessories made by other people. LifeBEAM was already working through the problem of fitting a new capability into an existing routine. Asking someone to change everything is an expensive way to sell one improvement.

In March 2016, LifeBEAM closed a $16 million financing round led by Square Peg, with investors including Wellborn, Cerca, Atomic14, and Triventures. Its technology had appeared in products associated with Samsung, Under Armour, JBL, and other brands. The financing supported a move toward its own consumer product. Supplying an ingredient and putting your own name on the finished object are different jobs; the latter makes every rough edge your responsibility.

Vi arrived as a voice-enabled pair of earphones. The proposition joined hardware, software, and spoken interaction. Instead of constantly consulting a screen, a user could speak and listen. This was the mid-2010s, before today’s conversational AI services became familiar companions on a laptop. The ear was already a plausible place to put a computer with something to say.

For Yoffe, Kickstarter supplied more than funding. He described the community as a way to test the market and help shape the product. Backers contributed to prototyping, testing, and voting. That made the campaign a public design process as well as a transaction. A backer could be both an early customer and a person willing to explain, sometimes at length, what the company ought to fix.

The campaign raised nearly $1.7 million and sold more than 8,000 units. Those numbers put an audience around the idea. They also put obligations around it. A prototype can be admired across a table; thousands of purchased devices have to survive ordinary use. Crowdfunding has a pleasingly democratic entrance and an extremely traditional exit: eventually, the boxes must arrive.

The customer changes the company

The consumer business did not remain the final form of Vi. Yoffe has described a severe contraction during its change of direction: a team of 53 became a core group of three as the company turned toward enterprise software. That account deserves to sit beside the funding announcements. Fifty people leaving a business is a consequential event, however neatly a later presentation might label it a pivot.

The change also altered what Vi sold and who signed the contract. A consumer judges an object they can hold. An enterprise buyer asks how a system will fit, what it will change, and whether the return can be measured. The founder has to learn a different vocabulary, but vocabulary alone does little. The economics and the daily work have to change with it.

By February 2025, Yoffe was describing an enterprise model built around direct work with senior decision-makers and the people responsible for a business’s financial performance. The relationship typically began with a three-month pilot, comparing an action group with a control group. Successful pilots could become partnerships lasting two or three years. It was a longer conversation than selling a pair of headphones.

He reported average net revenue retention of 134 percent and logo retention above 96 percent over the preceding three years. These were his figures, describing the business at that point. Net revenue retention follows spending by an existing customer group; logo retention follows whether customers stay. Together, the measures explain the appeal of enterprise relationships: keeping a customer and expanding the work can matter as much as winning a new one.

His emphasis on explainability follows the same logic. He has argued that people building and buying AI should insist on transparency in the models and products. A system that produces an impressive answer still leaves a manager with questions about why it worked and whether it will work again. Explaining an outcome is part of earning the next assignment.

A number with a job to do

On May 19, 2026, Vi announced a $145 million transaction at a $1.64 billion valuation, alongside a new suite of enterprise AI agents. The transaction combined primary and secondary capital. The company identified several purposes: recruiting and retaining people, investing in its platform and products, and strengthening its balance sheet. Those are specific uses for a number that could otherwise become the entire story.

Vi also said it was working with more than 100 enterprise customers. Its listed shareholders included General Atlantic, Revelstoke, 1902 Capital managed by The Pritzker Organization, Square Peg, Savano Capital, and Island Green. The audience for Yoffe’s work had changed again. Alongside customers and colleagues were investors expecting an organization that could keep performing after the announcement stopped circulating.

He treats valuation as an instrument for financing, ownership, and attracting people. He has urged focus and humility. The useful tension is that publicity can help a company recruit and sell, while also consuming the founder’s attention. There is no exemption from that tension for a founder who knows it exists.

“Stay focused, stay humble.”

Omri Yoffe

The minutes belong to someone

Yoffe’s concern with time predates the larger financing rounds. In a 2017 interview, he called it “by far the most precious asset you manage.” He paired careful scheduling with the ability to make decisions when the day changed without permission. The combination is revealing. A calendar is an intention; an operating company is a continuing series of interruptions.

Travel complicated that arithmetic. He spoke about leaving loved ones behind and making an effort to stay connected through short video calls or messages at the end of the day. It is a modest detail beside an aerospace résumé. It is also recognizable: the person building the company still has to make the call home.

He is a father of four. His described working habit is to start by clearing obstacles for his team, so colleagues can proceed without waiting for him. That is a useful test of executive productivity. Someone else getting on with their job can be a better result than another hour added to the boss’s diary.

There is an earlier social commitment, too. Yoffe founded OFEK, a nonprofit helping young people from disadvantaged backgrounds gain professional skills and enter working life. His résumé dates its beginnings to 2005, during his Air Force years. The overlap puts that effort before the consumer devices and the enterprise platform. Creating opportunities for other people was already among his projects.

His stated preferences are human in scale: openness, extended-family Shabbat dinners, colleagues who motivate him, and people who show resilience and respect. Asked for an alternative occupation, he chose exploring outer space. Apparently one can leave aerospace without quite surrendering the window seat.

The eleven-year-old with the gardening business could hardly have specified this sequence of companies, products, and customers. Looking backward makes a career appear more orderly than it felt while being lived. Yoffe’s story retains the turns: a demanding technical setting, a consumer product, a painful reduction, another way to serve a customer. The destination kept changing. The time was being spent either way. What mattered was finding work that justified spending it.