The camera was not where Oren Yogev wanted it. He was in Britain on a lunch break, watching Manchester United with Aviv and Matteo Shapira, when the conversation drifted toward an impossible view: the match from the perspective of the ball, or perhaps through the goalkeeper's eyes. The three engineers began sketching. They had worked around military drones and high-end imaging, so they understood both the machinery of sight and the frustration of being stuck with the angle a camera happened to occupy.
That pub conversation became Replay Technologies. Its freeD system would take feeds from an array of fixed cameras, reconstruct live action as a three-dimensional scene, and let a director move a virtual camera through it. The image looked airborne. The clever part was that nothing had flown. Software had created the freedom.
Years later, after major sports deployments and an acquisition by Intel, Yogev returned to the same underlying puzzle at a smaller, more intimate scale. Blink Technologies, which he co-founded with Gilad Drozdov, asks what an ordinary camera can learn from a person's eyes. Where Replay untethered the viewer's vantage point from the stadium camera, Blink tries to untether gaze tracking from specialized hardware.
A viewpoint born over lunch
Replay began in 2011 with a prototype and an unusually concrete test. The founders captured volumetric video around an Olympic training camp late that year. Yogev later said the result led to a memorandum of understanding reflecting the International Olympic Committee's interest in using the service during the 2012 London Games. The experiment turned a speculative sketch into something an exacting customer could evaluate.
The timing mattered. Sports broadcasting had spent decades adding cameras, longer lenses, steadier rigs, and better slow motion. Replay proposed a different bargain. Capture enough synchronized information around the field and the director could choose the viewpoint afterward. The system had to reconstruct multiple moving people in dense outdoor scenes at nearly real-time speed. That was the breakthrough Yogev identified as decisive for team sports.
How freeD changed the shot
By 2013, the technology had moved into American sports. The YES Network used it for New York Yankees home games. AT&T Stadium installed a 360-degree system that supported Dallas Cowboys coverage. The following spring, Replay upgraded 24 cameras in the stadium from 4K to 5K for college basketball's Final Four. The output supplied replays to both the broadcast and the in-venue production.
Those deployments forced a young company to live by television's clock. A demo could be intriguing; a live replay had to be ready when the producer called for it. Yogev described the sports ecosystem as result-driven and fast. Once the company was inside the production, engineers, operators, leagues, venues, and broadcasters had to behave like one team.
The exit and the restlessness
Replay expanded from baseball and football into basketball and other live events. Its premise also anticipated a change in audience behavior. Yogev argued in 2015 that digital viewers would expect more control than traditional television offered. Younger audiences were becoming “cord nevers,” comfortable getting entertainment online and choosing how to interact with it. freeD gave that prediction a physical form: the audience did not have to inherit the director's seat.
In March 2016, shortly after Replay announced a $13.5 million financing, Intel acquired the company. The reported price was $175 million. Replay's camera arrays, image processing, and virtual viewpoints became part of Intel's push into immersive sports media. Yogev joined Intel as a vice president, but the corporate chapter was short. He later said his “entrepreneurial soul” was stronger than his corporate one.
The exit polished the story from a distance. Up close, Yogev remembered the cash scares. He has said that he came near to running out of capital more than once while steering his first company. His investors helped the business through those moments, but his postmortem was unsentimental: watch cash flow more closely, and do not let optimism decide when the next fundraising process should begin.
Starting with more room
Blink was founded in 2018 in Palo Alto and Haifa. Yogev and Drozdov built it around passive eye tracking: AI-based software intended to work with the cameras already present in laptops, phones, displays, vehicles, and other devices. The company says the system can operate across major operating systems, locally at the edge or remotely in the cloud. The proposition is less equipment, broader distribution.
Dedicated eye trackers can combine specialized optics, illumination, and tightly paired software. Blink's approach makes the ordinary camera carry more responsibility. It has to handle differences in lighting, head position, faces, devices, and environments while still estimating where the user looks. That puts machine learning and software optimization at the center of the product.
The applications Blink describes range from gaze analysis for digital media to touch-free controls, retail interaction, and device security. Yogev put the ambition in familiar interface terms when the company announced its Series A: products that could replace a mouse or remote control and eventually join the next generation of touchscreens. The eye would become an input, not just something a screen tries to hold.
Blink announced a $14 million Series A in November 2021, led by INcapital Partners with participation from existing and other investors. Reporting at the time put its total funding at $24 million. Yogev said he structured the second startup with more financial cushion in its first two years. That buffer let the team take risks while searching for the right product-market fit, without reproducing Replay's closest calls.
The company as a decision system
Yogev's founder advice comes in clipped imperatives: “Work hard. Enjoy it. Be nice. Play fair. Delegate. Dream to leave something big behind you.” The most operational word is delegate. A computer-vision company can begin with a small group solving a problem that looks implausible. It cannot endure if every judgment continues to route through that same group.
He argues for installing a disciplined leadership system early, so decisions can spread through the organization without losing its principles. At Blink, he has credited Drozdov and early leaders Tsahi Mizrahi and Artyom Borzin as the backbone of the business, making many day-to-day calls. It is a telling choice of praise from a serial CEO. The system works when the founder is not the system.
His other rule concerns ideas before they become plans. Yogev often returns to the story of Kodak engineer Steve Sasson, whose digital camera was treated as a curiosity inside a company built around film. The lesson he drew was to avoid rejecting a colleague's strange proposal automatically. A hearing is not approval. It is simply enough room for an unexpected viewpoint to prove that it contains information.
Looking up, then looking again
Asked what brings out his creativity, Yogev once gave a disarmingly analog answer: a night walk, looking at the stars. It suits an engineer whose companies are built around sight but whose work depends on imagining what is absent. A camera is missing from the field. A dedicated sensor is missing from the laptop. The first response is not to add the missing object. It is to ask whether software can infer what that object would have seen.
That is the thread from Replay to Blink. The industries, customers, and interfaces changed. The intellectual move did not. Capture ordinary images from where cameras already sit. Reconstruct a richer account of attention or space. Give a person control over a viewpoint that used to belong to the equipment.
There is still a practical founder behind the imaginative one. He remembers when optimism threatened the cash balance. He favors early delegation. He knows a live production does not care how elegant the prototype looked yesterday. The difficult idea earns its place only when it survives contact with a venue, a device, a deadline, and a customer.
Yogev's career has moved from remote military imagery to stadium replay to the small movements of a user's eyes. Each chapter narrows the distance between a person and an image. The camera keeps its position. The software learns to see more.