Uri
Haramati

Uri Haramati runs Torii, a New York software company that does something companies rarely admit they need: it counts. Specifically, it counts the software that a modern business is paying for without quite knowing it. A marketing manager expenses a design tool. An engineer signs up for a monitoring service on a company card. Six months later nobody remembers either exists, but the invoices keep clearing. Torii finds all of it - the sanctioned apps, the forgotten ones, the ones IT never approved - puts them in one place, and then automates the boring work of onboarding, offboarding, and canceling the licenses nobody uses. Haramati and his co-founders are credited with more or less inventing the category, which is called SaaS management, a phrase that did not really exist as a product when they started.

This is an unglamorous thing to be excellent at, and that is roughly the point. Haramati arrived at enterprise plumbing after a career in the opposite of plumbing. Before Torii he co-founded Life on Air, the studio behind Meerkat and Houseparty, which are the kind of apps that get written about in cultural terms rather than financial ones. Meerkat was a live-streaming app that appeared in early 2015, reached a million users in a matter of weeks with no marketing budget, briefly became the thing every conference-goer was doing, and then lost its momentum almost overnight when Twitter cut off its access to the social graph. Houseparty was the group-video app that a lot of people rediscovered they had installed. Epic Games, the Fortnite company, acquired it in 2019.

The through-line is not the product. It is the person. "I've always considered myself a builder and a maker," Haramati has said. "From woodworking to software, I love being a part of the process of bringing ideas to life." Woodworking is a small detail but a revealing one - it suggests someone who likes the resistance of a material, the part where you shape a thing with your hands and it either holds or it does not.

What is genuinely unusual about Haramati is his willingness to walk away from things that are working. Life on Air did not build one app and iterate on it forever. It built Yevvo, learned that celebrities and ordinary friends wanted completely different things from live video, and closed it. It built Meerkat, watched it go vertical, and rather than fight to preserve a dying moment, moved on to Houseparty. Haramati has turned this into something close to a doctrine. "If we had tried to optimize Yevvo, we would have never created Meerkat," he says. "If we had tried to optimize Meerkat, we would have never created Houseparty." The claim underneath is that the big gains do not come from tuning; they come from the leap, and the leap requires being willing to abandon a perfectly good local maximum.

That instinct is unusual because most of the incentives in a company point the other way. Optimizing is safe. It has a spreadsheet. Leaping is how you end up explaining to your board why you shut down the app with the growth chart. Haramati's version of courage is specifically the courage to disappoint a metric.

How he learned product: by becoming the most obsessive user in the room

The origin of Haramati's product sense is not a design degree. He started in financial services, spending the late 2000s as a senior consultant at Deloitte, advising on the sort of problems that come with slide decks. He got restless. In the interval between consulting jobs he taught himself the tech industry more or less from scratch - reading blogs, going to pitch nights, absorbing coding and design, building a mental model of a world he had not been part of. His first swing was Skedook, an event-discovery app, around 2011.

When Life on Air came together, Haramati co-founded it with Ben Rubin and Itai Danino, and the three of them shared what he describes as a kind of complementary inexperience. None of them had run a company. None had raised money. None had coded a video app or managed a product team. They "learned everything on the go." What Haramati brought was a specific, almost anthropological habit: he watched. On his own apps he made himself the single most active video viewer among all users, not to promote anything but to see, in real time, what people actually did versus what they said they wanted. "It was simple and it just worked for our users," is how he describes Meerkat's brief magic, and the flatness of the sentence is the whole philosophy. He is suspicious of cleverness that users do not feel.

The year Torii sold nothing

Torii began in 2017, co-founded with Uri Nativ and Tal Bereznitsky, and its early history is a useful antidote to the idea that Haramati's companies simply catch fire. Torii had no product, no funding, and no team, and its founders were sure of exactly one thing: they had to build the technology on real data from actual companies, not on a whiteboard. So Haramati went to friends and offered them free lifetime access to a product that did not yet exist, in exchange for their real company data. He has since admitted, cheerfully, that he no longer remembers every promise he made in that period. "Good thing I love surprises," he said.

It took a full year to sign a first paying customer. The milestone he actually points to was Pipedrive, the first customer with no personal connection to the founders - the first time a stranger paid, which is the only kind of validation that counts. From there the standard startup physics took over. In 2021 Torii raised a $10M Series A led by Wing Venture Capital. In February 2022 it raised a $50M Series B led by Tiger Global, bringing total funding to $65M, on the back of revenue that had grown 300% and a headcount that had grown 600% in a year, with names like Instacart and Bumble on the customer list.

Then the market turned, as it did for everyone. In mid-2023, citing macroeconomic uncertainty and a push toward profitability, Torii reduced its team by roughly 30%. Haramati framed it as a strategic reset rather than a retreat, the kind of decision that is easy to describe and hard to make. It is the less-cinematic half of the founder story, and it belongs in the profile precisely because it is real.

Zero ego, or the closest thing to it

For someone who has co-founded three companies of consequence, Haramati talks strikingly little about himself as a solo protagonist. His co-founder relationships are, by his account, the quiet engine. "We have zero ego between us, zero politics," he says of the Torii partnership - a claim that is easy to make and rare to sustain across eight years and a funding rollercoaster. He credits a mantra from his military service, "if you don't have a solution, you are part of the problem," as the thing he actually hires for: not people who can spot what is broken, but people who cannot stop themselves from fixing it.

The ambition he keeps returning to is deliberately grand and slightly tongue-in-cheek. Torii's own hiring posts have described the goal as "one software to rule them all," a Lord of the Rings joke that is also a genuine thesis - that the sprawl of business software is itself a problem worth a company, and that the company solving it should be, fittingly, one piece of software. It is a very Haramati idea: take the thing everyone treats as background noise, decide it is the main event, and build the tool that makes it legible.