Ori Sasson and the problem that keeps calling back

Four brothers, six master’s degrees and a PhD. Before Ori Sasson’s career accumulated public offerings, acquisitions and board seats, there was this rather crowded family credential list. In 1994, while running Scopus Technology, he offered the tally with a founder’s eye for a memorable statistic. One imagines the qualifications alone could have occupied a respectable reception desk.

The brothers had come from Israel. Their business, based in Emeryville, California, was software for companies trying to handle their customers better. It was the sort of work that sounds obvious once somebody has made a business of it: keep track of the person calling, understand what they need, and put useful information where an employee can actually use it.

Sasson would spend the following decades working around versions of that problem. At Genesys, the setting was the contact center. At Globetouch, it was global connectivity, including connected cars. As an investor, he backed businesses ranging from enterprise technology to education. In 2026, his role as founder and CEO of Metafore brings him back to customer platforms, this time with AI.

The companies change. The persistent difficulty is coordination. A customer has one request; an organization may have several systems, departments and commercial arrangements involved in answering it. Read Sasson’s working life through that lens and the apparent detours begin to resemble a route.

A family business meets the customer queue

Scopus belongs to the early 1990s, before customer relationship management became an ordinary item in the enterprise software catalogue. Sasson was its chairman and chief executive. His academic preparation included a Berkeley bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics and a master’s in engineering and operations research. The combination fits a career spent dealing with information and the practical arrangements that make it useful.

The initial opportunity was specific. Businesses needed better ways to manage service interactions and customer information. Building a system inside each company was expensive. A software supplier could address the same recurring needs across customers. Scopus sold into that gap, turning an internal corporate headache into a product.

Hummer Winblad became a major financial backer in 1992. By 1996, Scopus had reached an initial public offering. In 1997, Sasson received the Bay Area Entrepreneur of the Year award. Then, in 1998, Siebel Systems agreed to buy Scopus in a stock transaction announced at approximately $461 million.

The pairing had a practical logic. Siebel supplied software for sales organizations; Scopus brought customer service software. Together, the businesses could address more of the relationship before and after a sale. Even a transaction with nine digits in its headline came down to a familiar office problem: the sales conversation and the service conversation ought to know about each other.

“Between ourselves, we have six master’s degrees, and one PhD.”

Ori Sasson · on the four Scopus brothers, 1994

Another desk, the same ringing phone

In 1999, Sasson became CEO of Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories. Genesys worked in computer telephony integration and enterprise interaction management. The labels have a period flavor, but the underlying task remains recognizable: help an organization manage the conversations arriving through its communications systems.

His remit included expanding the company’s international reach and assembling an international management team. In 2000, Genesys was acquired by Alcatel. For Sasson, this was another operating assignment ending in a sale, following his longer journey from founding Scopus through its public listing and combination with Siebel.

The distinction matters to the shape of his career. Building a company from its beginning and taking responsibility for an established company are different jobs. His record includes both, followed by investment work. He moved through the executive chair and the boardroom rather than making either one a permanent address.

Before founding Primera Capital in 2007, he was a partner at Apax Partners. Primera gave him another way to participate in technology companies. His portfolio history includes VMware, Fandango, Chegg and GT Nexus. The range extends beyond customer software, yet many of the businesses involve organizing information, transactions or activity among large numbers of participants.

The phone numbers that survive an acquisition

One relationship makes that investment history more personal. George Gallegos worked in sales leadership at Scopus and developed a close connection with Sasson. After Siebel acquired the company, they stayed in touch. Gallegos later brought Sasson in as an adviser to help secure an HP deal. Their conversations continued as Gallegos moved on to Cast Iron Systems.

It is a small, useful anecdote in a career otherwise easily reduced to transaction names. The Scopus sale changed the ownership of the business; it did not end every working relationship formed there. Years of conversation could travel further than an organization chart.

Primera’s work also reached students. In April 2010, it led a $6 million Series B investment in Cramster, an online homework help company, and Sasson joined the board. Cramster connected learners with subject experts and offered worked solutions. Here the coordination problem was on a much smaller scale: somebody stuck on a problem needed a useful explanation.

His brother Sharam’s Jitterbit addressed data integration, helping software applications work together. Primera invested there too. The family connection and the technology connection sit comfortably beside each other. Scopus had brought the brothers into customer software; their later work continued through companies dealing with the consequences of having many separate systems.

When the customer happens to be a car

Globetouch, co-founded by Sasson in 2014, brought him into another setting for complicated connections. A connected device may be sold into one market and used in another. Mobile operators have their own networks and commercial arrangements. Manufacturers want products that can work across those boundaries without turning every new territory into a separate engineering project.

As CEO, Sasson worked on a business offering global connectivity through a network of operator relationships and cloud-based technology. In June 2016, Globetouch announced investment from existing shareholders CK Hutchison and Digicel, alongside new strategic investors including NTT DoCoMo, 263 China and Qihoo 360. At the time, it said it operated in more than 100 countries.

This work followed his involvement with Roamware, later known as Mobileum. In 2013, while chairman and CEO of Roamware, he was promoting CloudSIM as a way for operators to offer more attractive roaming services. Globetouch’s ambitions therefore had a preceding chapter in his career: the business of making mobile service function across networks.

An earlier Roamware transaction shows how concrete that international work could be. In October 2012, the company acquired IPcom, a supplier of mobile services based in Uruguay. IPcom brought operator customers in 18 Latin American countries and products covering areas including messaging, roaming and location services. Sasson was Roamware’s chairman and CEO at the time. Expansion here meant acquiring a business with regional relationships and a set of working products. The geography came with people who already knew the market. Alongside the software sat the commercial knowledge required to put it to use. It is a useful detail beside the later Globetouch story: international reach has to be assembled through specific organizations and agreements, territory by territory.

In April 2017, Riccardo Di Blasio succeeded Sasson as Globetouch CEO, with Sasson continuing as vice chairman. The handoff added an executive whose background included VMware, EMC and Cohesity. It was a change in responsibility within a company Sasson continued to support.

The story took another turn in February 2020. Globetouch announced its new name, Airlinq, and identified Sasson as CEO in the announcement. He described the change as a move from global connectivity toward broader services and partnerships. The announcement named automotive and telecom customers including General Motors, Daimler, Volvo and Reliance Jio.

Today, Airlinq lists him as vice chairman, with Sunil Kaul as CEO. The names and titles trace a continuing relationship through different stages of the business. Connected cars provide the visible product; behind them sit the less photogenic arrangements among software, networks and service providers. Somebody has to make those arrangements work.

“The rebranding signifies an extension in focus from global connectivity to broader ecosystem enablement centric product offerings.”

Ori Sasson · Airlinq rebrand announcement, 2020

Back at the customer’s door

At MWC Barcelona in March 2026, Sasson’s speaker listing identified him as Metafore’s chairman and CEO. The new company positions itself around AI for enterprise operations, including the customer platforms and contact centers familiar from his earlier career. After the telecom years and investment work, the subject feels unusually close to where he began.

Metafore describes software agents that can work across organizational systems. Its public focus includes travel, banking and telecommunications. Those are businesses where a request often touches several places before anything is resolved. A booking, an account and a service conversation may all have to agree with one another.

The company’s stated ambition is to expand what human teams can reason through and accomplish. Its published principles emphasize collaboration, deliberate decisions and shared ownership. These are company commitments, and the test lies in what the product and organization deliver. Sasson’s history supplies context for the ambition rather than a guarantee of the result.

There is a pleasing circularity here. Scopus helped companies manage customer information. Genesys dealt with enterprise interactions. Globetouch addressed connections across operators and devices. Metafore proposes to coordinate work across the systems an enterprise already has. Each chapter brings a different technical answer to the difficulty of making an organization respond coherently.

For a founder with this many completed transactions behind him, another executive role is a concrete choice. He is again attached to the daily work of a company building something for customers. The early family tally counted qualifications; the subsequent career counts organizations, relationships and successive attempts to fix the handoff. Somewhere, a customer is still waiting for an answer. Sasson is working on the arrangements behind it.