Or Bokobza

A neighborhood, then a company.

Or Bokobza runs Venn from 12 Vestry Street in Tribeca, but the origin story lives in Shapira, a rough patch of south Tel Aviv he and two army friends set out to improve in 2016 by, essentially, buying a large slice of it and running the resident experience by hand. They did the leases. They planned the block parties. They found the coffee shop, and they made sure the coffee shop knew the tenants by name. The software came later, which is the correct order and also unusually rare in proptech.

Venn today is a resident-experience platform - the polite category name is "property management SaaS" - that sits between owner-operators of multifamily buildings and the people who rent from them. There is an app residents open to reserve amenities, pay rent, message the community, get their packages, and complain about the elevator. There is a back end that the property manager uses to look at all of that as data. The bet, roughly, is that if a landlord treats residents like customers rather than lease-holders, residents renew, ancillary revenue goes up, and net operating income - the number landlords actually care about - improves. That is a boring sentence for what is actually a philosophical claim: that community can be operationalized.

Bokobza believes this claim so completely that he grew up inside its proof of concept. He was raised in an Israeli cooperative community, the kind of intentional-neighborhood arrangement that pre-dates the word "coliving" by about a century. He went into the army at 18 and served for eight years, ultimately as a Major, in an elite special forces unit. He met Chen Avni, his eventual Venn co-founder, in training when they were both 18. They stayed friends. They fought together. And then, twelve years later, they built a company that treats the concept of neighbors as a product.

Before Venn there was Selina, the hospitality and coliving chain, where Bokobza was a founding partner starting in 2013. Selina taught him the mechanics of running physical space at scale - the front-of-house choreography, the design vocabulary, the way an occupancy chart translates into culture. In 2016, he and Avni moved into Shapira. They lived in the neighborhood they intended to fix. This is not a metaphor. Bokobza is one of those founders who insists on being downstream of his own product, and it shows in the way he talks about it.

The pitch to landlords is straightforward and, if you like this sort of thing, quite clever. Multifamily real estate has spent a decade digitizing the wrong thing: the transactional layer between resident and building. The lease renews, the rent gets paid, the maintenance ticket gets closed - and then nothing. Venn's argument is that everything between those transactions - the amenity bookings, the neighbor chats, the block-party invites, the local-business perks - is where retention is actually decided. Landlords who ignore that layer are optimizing the receipt while losing the customer. Venn sells the layer.

Investors have found this persuasive. Venn has raised roughly $140 million to date, most recently a $52 million round announced in November 2025, led by NOA and CIM Group. The company reports it operates across 62 cities and grew ARR ninefold on its way into the round. It employs about 130 people, most of them shipping code in a stack that includes React, React Native, Kubernetes, Snowflake, GraphQL, Temporal, and AWS Bedrock. This is not a real-estate company that acquired an app; it is a software company that built a real-estate practice, which is a subtle but important distinction inside a category that has, historically, gotten this backward.

There is one detail worth pausing on, because it explains something about the man. On October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, Bokobza was in the country. He is an IDF reserves officer. He reported for duty immediately. He was deployed. In his absence Venn's chief operating officer, Ilan Zachar, took operational leadership of the company, ran the roadmap, kept customers, and did not miss a beat. The company later wrote publicly about the arrangement, framing it as a lesson in founder redundancy. The lesson underneath the lesson is that Bokobza, who runs a company about belonging, treats belonging as a two-way obligation. When his other community called, he went.

What he wants, if you take his own words at face value, is to make city living less lonely. "Loneliness is on the rise," he told No Camels in 2019. "People are looking to be part of something that is bigger than them; to be engaged." The public version of this thesis is a SaaS product with an ARR chart. The private version, the one you hear when Bokobza is talking about Shapira or about the barista who remembers your regular order, is closer to a civic project than a software one. It is also, at 130 employees and 62 cities, a business.