A sports fan can be sitting in an arena, watching in a bar, or following the score at home. The label stays the same. Almost everything useful about the situation changes. Ran Ben-Yair made a business out of taking those changes seriously. At Ubimo, the company he co-founded and led, a phone’s movement through the world offered a way to understand the circumstances around an audience. The map needed people in it.
His route to that idea began with much smaller pieces of software. Before the location intelligence, the outdoor advertising and the agreement with Quotient, there were web widgets: little applications that brought a game, a weather report or a useful tool into someone’s daily browsing. Google bought that company, LabPixies, in 2010. Ben-Yair joined the buyer, worked on Search, and eventually went out to build again.
Look across those ventures and a practical curiosity comes into view. What does the software know about the situation? What should it offer next? And how much effort should the person on the other side have to expend? His later work in residential leasing gives those questions a New York address, along with rather more paperwork.
The web, in miniature
LabPixies began in 2006. Ben-Yair founded it with Oded Poncz, Udi Graff and Nir Tzemah. Its products occupied a corner of the internet where personalization meant arranging useful little things around yourself. News, games, calendars and calculators could sit within the platforms people already visited. A modest rectangle on a screen had a job to do.
That was a consumer business with considerable reach. Over four years, LabPixies grew to tens of millions of users. Its applications crossed web and mobile settings, including iGoogle and the iPhone. By the time Google bought it, the company had shown that small products could find a substantial public.
The April 2010 acquisition became Google’s first purchase of an Israeli company. The team joined Google’s Tel Aviv operation. Contemporary reports put the price at roughly $25 million; the figure was a reported estimate. More revealing than the price was the fit: Google wanted the team’s experience in applications and the developer ecosystem around iGoogle. The little widgets had acquired a very large landlord.
Inside Google, Ben-Yair became a product manager in Search. In August 2011, he wrote the launch announcement for Google Related, a browser feature that offered material relevant to the page someone was already reading. Visit a restaurant website, and the tool could bring up a map, reviews and other places to eat. The product worked from the context already on the screen.
It is an early, concrete example of a concern that would recur in his career. Software could save a person the work of assembling related information. The trick was deciding which connections deserved to appear.
A familiar group, a different map
By June 2013, Ben-Yair was building Ubimo with Poncz, Graff and Gilad Amitai. For the first three, this was their fourth shared workplace: Samsung’s Israeli research operation, LabPixies, Google, then Ubimo. Tzemah remained at Google. Amitai brought experience from Matomy Media Group.
Startup stories often introduce a company as if everyone arrived freshly unwrapped. Here, three founders already had a substantial working history. They had experienced a large technology company, a venture of their own and an acquisition from the inside. Ubimo gave that accumulated familiarity a different problem to solve.
The early company was small, with six employees when it appeared in that June report. Its ambition concerned the information surrounding a mobile user: nearby businesses, events, weather, demographics and the character of an area. A location became more useful when other facts were allowed to gather around it.
A sports fan is not a place
Ben-Yair made the idea tangible when discussing March Madness in 2016. Advertisers could distinguish people attending a game from people watching elsewhere. They could also change a message when a local team advanced or won. An audience category became a starting point for a more particular decision.
Consider the timing. A congratulatory advertisement needs an outcome to congratulate. Send it before the result and the clever targeting becomes an expensive misunderstanding. His advice connected the event, the audience and the moment, bringing the campaign closer to what was actually happening around the customer.
The same reasoning carried into outdoor advertising. A billboard occupies a fixed location; its potential audience passes through. By 2019, Ben-Yair was describing a way to begin with the audience a customer wanted to reach, then examine which physical locations matched that audience. Stores and billboards became parts of the same planning conversation.
He also warned against treating a neighborhood’s static characteristics as an adequate description of everybody moving through it. Residents and passersby can tell different stories. For a retailer choosing a store location, or an advertiser choosing a panel, that distinction affects what the data can reasonably explain.
For physical retailers, he argued, location intelligence could inform decisions before a shopper ever saw an advertisement. Choosing a new storefront had traditionally involved broad census information, competitors’ choices and judgment. Movement data offered another way to examine the people a location might serve. That widened the job beyond buying media: the same interest in where audiences went could bear on where a business decided to put its own front door.
The difficulty hiding in a decimal point
There was an awkward condition attached to all this precision: the underlying information had to be usable. In 2015, Ben-Yair put it bluntly: “Location fraud is the easy part.” His point concerned the relatively straightforward task of filtering obviously bad signals. The harder questions involved the quality of what remained.
A coordinate can look impressively exact and still refer to the wrong place. Lose decimal places, and its useful resolution changes. Confuse precision with accuracy, and an advertiser can repeatedly reach the wrong patch of ground with admirable consistency. A map has a way of making uncertainty look tidier than it is.
That technical complication belongs in his story because it places a limit on the attractive business proposition. Knowing where a device appears to be is a measurement problem before it becomes a marketing opportunity. Ubimo’s promise depended on making something useful from those signals, with all the distinctions the work required.
When the customer takes the controls
By September 2019, Ben-Yair described an operation approaching 55 people, with about 15 in New York and a research and development center in Israel. The two-city arrangement put the business operation in New York while retaining the engineering base in Israel. The six-person company of the early coverage had become a larger organization with a transatlantic working day.
The next corporate step came in November. Quotient, already a customer and partner, announced an agreement to acquire Ubimo. It wanted to strengthen its advertising platform, accelerate self-service development and connect Ubimo’s capabilities with its own shopper data. The relationship had existed for years before the deal.
Announced acquisition terms. The earnout depended on targets; these figures describe the transaction.
The terms made the distinction between present payment and future performance explicit. Quotient disclosed $15 million upfront, plus an earnout of up to $25 million over two years if targets were met. The potential total was conditional. The strategic purpose was more straightforward: make the technology part of a broader system used by brands and retailers.
For Ben-Yair, whose earlier company had also joined a larger technology business, this was a second acquisition chapter. LabPixies had brought consumer applications into Google. Ubimo brought data and media capabilities into Quotient. Each deal placed a specialist team inside a buyer with an existing platform and its own plans for distribution.
The spreadsheet survives
Alongside the platforms and transactions sits a pleasantly ordinary detail. Asked in 2019 which software he could not live without, Ben-Yair answered: “Spreadsheets!” He described his working style with another single word: “Commitment.” His routine included inbox zero; his reading included Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, on a tablet.
“Spreadsheets!”
Ran Ben-Yair, on his indispensable software, 2019
He also described trying to listen well and resist impulsive decisions. These were his stated habits, rather than a portrait of the founder as a permanently inspired improviser. The humble spreadsheet fits comfortably here. Even a company concerned with movement needs somewhere to put the rows.
The next address is an apartment
Ben-Yair’s later chapter is Rello, where he is founder and CEO. The company focuses on residential leasing in New York City. Its account of its origins starts with the founders’ own frustrations as New Yorkers confronting complicated rental processes. Putting familiar forms online, they felt, had left the underlying process largely intact.
Rello’s current platform connects applications, screening, lease creation, payments, move-in and renewals. Its product descriptions include support for New York rent-stabilized leases and bulk renewals. These are specific operational tasks, with deadlines, documents and several people involved. The user’s setting has become unusually literal: an apartment, and the steps required to get into it.
A patent application published in February 2024 adds another detail. Titled Prequalification of users, it names Ben-Yair, Amitai, Adam Semler and Alex Friedman as inventors, with Rello Group as the applicant. The document concerns users and properties. Amitai’s appearance also extends a professional connection visible in the Ubimo chapter.
Across this career, the scale has shifted from a small box in a browser to moving audiences and the machinery of leasing. The everyday task remains a useful place to look. A widget should earn its space. An advertisement should understand its moment. A rental application should help someone reach a signed lease. For all the corporate changes along the route, there is something satisfyingly concrete about ending at a front door.