Buying a present with friends sounds like a modest administrative undertaking. Agree on the gift. Collect the money. Buy it. Yet anyone who has tried knows the supporting cast: the friend who forgets, the friend who needs reminding, and the organizer who becomes an unpaid accounts department. Ron Gura looked at that little mess and helped build a company around it. Years later, he would return to a much harder version of the same question: who does the work when life requires people to coordinate?
The first company was The Gifts Project. The later one is Empathy, which Gura co-founded with Yonatan Bergman in 2020. Between them sit years at eBay, a spell at venture firm Aleph, and a senior job at WeWork. The business cards changed. A recognizable interest runs through the work: helping people get something done when the process is in their way.
The birthday problem
Gura’s early commercial education included a guitar. At fourteen, he bought a used 1967 Fender Jaguar in Colorado, judging it underpriced. A few months later, he sold it in Israel for five times what he had paid. Asked about his first steps in business years afterward, he offered the transaction with a shrug: “All downhill from there.” A respectable return, and a suitably unreasonable benchmark for the rest of adolescence.
In 2009, Gura co-founded The Gifts Project with Maya Gura, Matan Bar, and Erez Dickman. Its proposition was easy to understand. A shopper could choose an item on a retailer’s site, invite friends to contribute, and complete the purchase once the group had covered the price. The reminders and contributions could live in a product, saving the organizer some diplomatic labor.
Retailers had a reason to care as well. A group could afford a gift that one person might hesitate to buy. The company connected a social habit to the checkout, turning a loose arrangement among friends into something a shopping site could accommodate. It was a small piece of coordination with a straightforward commercial use.
eBay became a partner, then the buyer. In September 2011, it acquired The Gifts Project. Gura joined the larger organization and went on to lead its Israel Innovation Center. For a founder, the customer becoming the acquirer is quite a change in the relationship. The work continued, now inside the company whose shoppers the team had been serving.
A year spent deciding
After eBay, Gura gave himself a period of exploration. He spent 2015 as an entrepreneur in residence at Aleph, working around founders and the firm’s partners, Michael Eisenberg and Eden Shochat. He considered starting another company. He also considered becoming a full-time investor. For someone accustomed to building, that year offered the chance to look closely at several possible directions without committing immediately to one.
In January 2016, he announced his decision: he was joining WeWork as Senior Vice President, Digital Israel, and establishing its product and engineering center in Tel Aviv. He had already worked near the company through Aleph. The attraction was a chance to build services for an existing community, with a global organization around them.
His announcement ended with recruitment. He wanted engineers, designers, and product people. Building the team was one of the parts he looked forward to. That emphasis gives the executive titles some substance: his work involved assembling the people who would make an organization’s plans operate in software. At WeWork, he started and oversaw a global research and development center of 250 team members.
There was an outward-facing side to that work, too. He supported the team’s involvement with She Codes, a community helping women develop software skills and enter technology jobs. His argument connected the company’s local responsibilities with the industry around it. A product center could do useful work beyond its own list of deliverables.
When the paperwork comes home
Empathy grew from experiences Gura had carried for years. His brother Amir died at eight. Gura has described watching the effect on his mother and wanting to ease what she was carrying. Later, while managing at eBay, he saw an employee dealing with the loss of a family member and the practical responsibilities that followed. He found that he had few useful tools to offer.
The work was extensive, and the employee was also returning to a job. Gura described the situation as effectively holding two jobs at once. There were arrangements to make and affairs to settle. A manager could offer sympathy, but sympathy did not close an account or put the right document in the right place.
That observation became a product question. What could be taken off a family’s list? Which instructions could be made easier to follow? How could someone understand the order of tasks without first learning an unfamiliar system? These are ordinary design questions in an unusually demanding setting. The person using the service has other things to think about.
Gura and Bergman founded Empathy in 2020; its first product launched in 2021. The company combined software with people who could help families navigate practical matters. Its services included organizing documents, closing accounts, and guidance through estate administration. The ambition was to make an unwelcome project smaller and more manageable, including helping people see what needed attention now and what could wait.
- 01Find the documentsKeep important information together.
- 02Sort the next stepsUnderstand what needs attention.
- 03Get help doing themSoftware and people share the work.
An insurance policy with a next chapter
There is a distribution problem hidden in a service like this. The people who need it are unlikely to have been eagerly shopping for it. Gura’s route was to work with organizations already present when a family needs assistance: insurers and employers. New York Life became Empathy’s first insurance partner. Others followed, including MetLife and Guardian.
The familiar insurance relationship has a clear event at its center: a claim and a payout. Empathy adds practical help beyond that point. A family can receive assistance through an organization it already knows, rather than having to discover a separate service while managing a crowded list of obligations. For the insurer, the relationship has a reason to continue after the payment.
Gura has spent years explaining this to the industry. His conversation on That Annuity Show in March 2024 dealt with claims, the administrative work families face, and the experience carriers offer. The topic gives a clue to his job as CEO. He has to make a personal problem legible to institutions, then show how those institutions can help address it.
Expansion brought that approach into other markets. Empathy entered Canada and the United Kingdom in 2025. In April 2026, its Zurich partnership made Loss Support available to three million UK Life Protection customers. Documents, account closures, estate guidance, and family collaboration were part of the offering. A familiar customer relationship became a route to additional practical help.
The documents you leave behind
Some of the work can begin before a family needs it. Empathy launched LifeVault in 2024, bringing preparation into a business that began with the aftermath of loss. Wills, trusts, and other important documents belong to the category of tasks people can postpone with impressive consistency. Each delay also leaves a little more uncertainty for somebody else.
For Gura, planning ahead fits the same interest in reducing the work a family must do. It also changes when the service can be useful. A person can organize information, make wishes clearer, and begin conversations while there is time to do so. The eventual beneficiary of that effort may be someone who never saw the preparation happening.
The company’s own timeline marks another side of the story: financing. A $47 million Series B in 2024 was followed by a $72 million Series C in May 2025, bringing total funding to $162 million. Adams Street Partners led the later round. Those figures describe capital raised by the company. The practical purpose was expansion into more markets and further development of its services.
Round sizes, shown to scale. Total raised after Series C: $162 million.
Someone to disagree with
Gura’s account of building includes room for objections. Saul Klein backed The Gifts Project and later Empathy. Gura calls him when contemplating a large decision because he wants the opposing case. The relationship has survived both an acquisition and another company’s formation. A repeat investor can bring memory as well as money, including the willingness to question an idea before everyone gets attached to it.
“I always want to listen to the contrarian because it sharpens my thinking.”Ron Gura
In September 2026, Gura described Empathy as a connected platform and reported that it supported more than 50 million people across the US, Canada, and UK. That figure describes the reach of its coverage; it does not mean 50 million people are using the service. He also described relationships with nearly 50 life insurers. The company had moved well beyond its initial launch.
The scale is easier to picture than the daily work behind it. An important document gets found. A task gets completed. Someone learns that a particular call can wait. Gura’s career has taken him from a shared birthday present to the affairs a family must settle, with several organizations in between. He keeps returning to the person left holding the list. Making that list shorter is a useful thing to do.