[Top SaaS & Israel Business Series] Unlock Your Company’s Digital Wisdom With Yuval Gonczarowski

Yuval Gonczarowski is the Founder and CEO of Akooda, an AI-powered operations intelligence platform that helps organizations unify and analyze internal data to drive faster, smarter decisions. Under his leadership, Akooda has secured $11 million in seed funding, used by Fortune 500 companies to streamline operations and unlock insights across digital workflows. A graduate of Harvard Business School with a MBA and the Technion from Israel Institute of Technology, Yuval previously served in Israel’s elite Unit 8200 and held technical and leadership roles at Intel, Apple, McKinsey & Company, and Tomorrow.io. He brings a unique blend of engineering expertise and business acumen to the enterprise tech space.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:06] Yuval Gonczarowski discusses how Akooda transitioned from analytics to enterprise AI search
• [06:35] Building the digital footprint engine to map company activities
• [08:46] Landing Akooda’s first paying customer with a scrappy prototype
• [11:02] How the com chart reveals real-time collaboration and silos
• [13:45] The evolution of Akooda’s product and customer impact
• [16:31] Yuval explains how they are helping sales teams get faster answers through enterprise intelligence
• [18:12] How Akooda integrates with various workflow systems
• [23:57] Strategies for rolling out Akooda across 2,000+ employee organizations
• [31:43] Balancing fundraising with product development and customer growth
• [38:19] The impact of a no-meeting week at a large fintech company

In this episode…

Information overload and organizational silos pose significant challenges for growing companies. As teams scale, finding the right data, the right person, or simply understanding cross-functional collaboration becomes chaotic and time-consuming. How can leaders eliminate these inefficiencies without adding more complexity to their workflows?

Yuval Gonczarowski, an expert in AI-powered enterprise intelligence and operational analytics, shares how companies can solve these challenges by leveraging their digital footprints. He explains the evolution from traditional organizational charts to dynamic knowledge graphs, enabling companies to map collaboration patterns in real-time. He emphasizes actionable insights like implementing topic-based search, integrating systems like Slack and Salesforce for unified visibility, and using anomaly detection to spot inefficiencies. Yuval also offers strategies for improving productivity without disrupting current workflows, such as Slack-based search commands and Chrome extensions that surface hidden insights.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Yuval Gonczarowski, CEO of Akooda, about optimizing enterprise operations through AI-driven insights. Yuval discusses how to eliminate information silos, speed up decision-making, and roll out enterprise tools with minimal disruption. He also shares the story of Akooda’s first customer, explains the ROI of reducing information hunting, and details lessons from serving large-scale enterprise clients.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Yuval Gonczarowski on LinkedIn
• Akooda

Special Mention(s):

• Mobileye
• Andrew Gottlieb on LinkedIn
• Secureframe
• DocSend
• Cursor

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Israel Leader Series] Engineering the Autonomous Revolution with Rabbi Mois Navon of Mobileye” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top SaaS & Israel Business Series] From Handling Million Dollar Cameras to Reinventing Security With Joe Levy” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Learning From the Experts: How Andrew Gottlieb Discovered His Passions” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Scaling companies, even successful ones, face growth pains — two people working on the same thing.”
• “The org chart is a lagging indicator — how people work today is completely different.”
• “Search isn’t just finding a file — it’s asking who can help me solve something.”
• “At a hundred people, Slack breaks — you can’t just channel everything and expect clarity.”
• “Building great companies is not just about the product, it’s about the relationships you nurture.”

Action Steps:

1. Map real collaboration patterns, not just org charts: Understanding who actually works together reveals hidden influencers and smarter team-building opportunities.
2. Integrate communication and project management systems: Connecting Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and others provides a unified digital footprint for faster and more accurate insights.
3. Use anomaly detection to spot inefficiencies: Identifying workflow slowdowns early helps prevent small issues from becoming costly operational problems.
4. Empower employees with enterprise search tools: Fast, AI-driven access to internal knowledge removes friction from decision-making and boosts productivity.
5. Measure business impact from internal experiments: Analyzing initiatives like no-meeting weeks with real data leads to smarter workplace policies and cultural improvements.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of Inspired Insider where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Yuval and Yuval runs Akooda. You can check him out at Akooda. Before I formally introduce you.

Yuval, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is kind of a combination. This is part of the top Israel Business Leader series and SaaS series. I’ve had some interesting Israeli companies, Yuval you’d appreciate. So I had Mois Navon, who was one of the founding engineers at Mobileye, and he talked about the journey, which is interesting. If you don’t know, Mobileye was acquired by Intel for $15.3 billion, I think, on the interview.

You’ve already made the mistake of saying 15.2, and he corrected me. Because you know, that point does make a difference. But he talked about the ups and downs, right? You’d think, oh, it was just this like upward trajectory. And it wasn’t.

He talked about having to go back to his kids and his wife and, you know, pulling the kids out of extracurriculars. No more eating out because there were lean times during those days, too. Sure, we can all relate to that. There’s also — I had run Geva, a founder of webs.io. They help companies with brand protection.

I don’t know if you know these people you know through.

Yuval Gonczarowski: 01:41

But some of my best friends work at Mobileye.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 01:43

Okay. Cool. Joe Levy started I lurch, which is a company to the power to combat mass shootings and violence to detect guns. So it’s a really interesting weapons detection using surveillance cameras. So there’s some cool companies.

Check them out. On inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships.

We do it in two ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability, and the full execution and production. And number two, we’re also an easy button for a company’s corporate gifting. We make gifting and stay, you know, staying top of mind.

Easy for clients, partners, prospects. And, you know, keeping in touch can be, you know, a chore. Sometimes we call ourselves the magic elves. You’ve all that run in the background and make it stress free. Impossible.

So companies can build great relationships. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships. I found no better way over the past decade to profile the companies I admire, and also send them delicious treats in the mail so you can check out Rise25 or email us at [email protected].

A special shout-out to Andrew Gottlieb, who introduced us. He’s a founder and CEO of No Typical Moments, and they specialize in working with purpose-driven and social impact businesses as a digital agency. So I am super excited to introduce Yuval Gonczarowski. He started off in Israel’s 8200 intelligence unit. One fun fact about Yuval is he worked on the first prototype of the iPhone while at Apple.

What’s that?

Yuval Gonczarowski: 03:35

The Apple Watch?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:36

The Apple Watch okay, cool. That’s super impressive. And just to introduce Akooda, the operations intelligence platform that helps innovative organizations unlock companywide insights with the world’s leading AI-powered enterprise search. And he’ll go into that a little bit. So Yuval, thanks for joining me.

Yuval Gonczarowski: 03:56

It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:58

So I’m going to pull up a kudos so people can check it out, but just start off and tell us Akooda and a little bit more about what you do.

Yuval Gonczarowski: 04:06

Yeah. So accurately Akooda originally started as an analytics company. I go back before the LM era where, you know, machine learning, deep learning, big data analytics was the buzzword. And we’re only talking about four years ago. Right.

But technology is moving fast. Basically what we set out to do is what I set out to do is combine my two biggest passions in life. The first one is big data time series analytics. I’ve done that my whole life at Apple, later at Intel, as well as my time as a consultant with McKinsey. And the second thing is proper business management, right?

Scaling companies. Every company goes through growth pains, even when everything is fine. I’ve seen organizations, extremely successful organizations where two people are working on the same thing or teams are not in sync. And so combining these two passions was my goal when I started Akooda and we took a look at the entire digital footprint that companies have and drew significant insights and anomalies from that, like changes in share of attention or projects shifting from one thing to another, or where my resources are being allocated. And that grew very fast, and we had a phenomenal time doing that.

When LLMs sort of became a thing of the public, we realized that we had something even bigger in our hands, which is we had a way of understanding how companies operate, and we were already integrated with the digital footprint of these organizations very deeply. We’ve already had deep knowledge graphs about who knows who, who’s working on what. And so the next natural step was to build a highly secure, really enterprise search or enterprise intelligence platform that lets you ask really any question that you want and get an immediate answer. And that’s where Akooda is today. The biggest benefit to using Akooda is, or one of the biggest, is that not only do we provide the answer, but also a deep layer of analytics and insights on top of the answer.

And we do all of that without storing your company’s raw data on our servers. Right. So we know where the data lives on your systems. And we have it patented on-demand mechanism, on-demand querying mechanism that lets us exactly pick and choose the data that is relevant for us to give you the right answer.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:17

I want to talk about the evolution of the product you mentioned. We started off with analytics, and I don’t know if you want to talk about maybe the first customer or the first customers that you got, and then we could talk about kind of how the product evolved.

Yuval Gonczarowski: 06:35

Yeah. If we’re looking at the website, there’s one thing if you — if we scroll a little bit more down, it’s we call it the com chart here. Just go up a little bit. See that little thing a little bit more up on where the animation is. That little thing on the right here.

Yeah. That you see that like chart construct between people on the bottom left.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:54

Yeah.

Yuval Gonczarowski: 06:55

We call this the com chart. It’s basically a way of understanding. I don’t believe in the org chart. I believe the org chart is a lagging indicator for how the organization’s working. Right?

Like who reports to whom is actually what should have been done a few months ago. But how people are working now. We have this thing called the com chart for them, and we draw this fully automatically. Now we do this based on certain topics, projects. I’ll know human in the loop, so you can actually see working patterns across the organization.

Get to the exact person that you need that can answer your question. It’s a big time saver, especially for companies with 20, 30, 40,000 employees that we have as customers. Actually, when I set out to fundraise, it was just me and a crazy idea. That was the only thing I had. I just I built that kind of — hacked my way into a script that does this.

And you asked me about my first customer. This is a fun story. So, you know, you talk to potential investors and other people. And one of the folks I was talking to was a great friend of mine, Bob Mason from Argon Ventures, who actually led the seed round drowned at my former company. The company I worked with prior Climacell.

And I showed this to Bob. He said, this is pretty cool. Let me introduce you to another friend of mine who is the VP of engineering at a very large organization. I meet that VP of engineering, you know, large enterprise. They see this.

He’s like, all right, you have a great idea, but I’m not going to onboard something like that because compliance security Vendor Questionnaire is like, talk to me when you’re bigger. Like, all right. You know, it’s another call that I had few hours. I get a text from that guy saying, you know, I actually spoke about this with my partner back home, and she works for a small organization. She was actually really interested to see the chart of her company.

Can you get on a call with her? I got on a call with her and she asked me, how much is this going to cost? And I’m like, you know, $1,000 a month.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:41

Did you say it like that with a question? Send me something I don’t know.

Yuval Gonczarowski: 08:46

And actually, 24 hours later, I went to just start a Delaware company because I needed to get paid and that’s how the company started. So that’s the first customer. Which is a great story.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:57

Just before you raise money.

Yuval Gonczarowski: 08:58

Or we raised any money. So technically that’s the first customer of course.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:03

And she wanted she was interested in the com chart.

Yuval Gonczarowski: 09:06

Yeah. The com chart just like especially and you know this is big Covid days. No one knows who’s working with whom. And on how do we integrate new employees. Like we all felt this even I you know, a company you’re trying to understand what’s going on in your organization and you lose one of your senses, right?

Like, you just don’t know what’s going on. So and I think in a sense, that was a lot of the luck that brought us to a good start, because large organizations, enterprises feel this every day, right? Even if you’re 100% in the office, you’re at a 20-story building. It’s basically like you’re working remote. Second floor doesn’t see the 20th floor.

No one has any idea. But like we saw earlier, bigger organizations won’t bring a small startup to solve something like that unless they have some traction and proof, right? And we were at a very special point in time or 3 or 4 years ago, where smaller organizations that were more agile, lean, early adopters feeling those same pains. And so we had a great set of early customers that were able to take us further down the path of experimentation, refining the product, understanding how we can leverage the digital footprint, keeping security and privacy in mind. And I can talk a lot about security and privacy.

It’s a big thing here, of course, but keeping those things in mind and still giving everyone in the organization the visibility to their best.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:29

So I’m curious, Yuval, what was interesting to that person, why was the control? How are they going to use it? And I just want to point out here, I love how you could see here, if you’re looking at the video, there’s Slack, there’s Salesforce, there’s Google Calendar, there’s Google Drive. And like all of it’s kind of being fed into this Akooda engine. It spits out, you know what he was talking about, which started with this com chart.

But what was interesting to her about this. How were they using it?

Yuval Gonczarowski: 11:02

Yeah. Maybe I’ll share a story from another customer that we had a few weeks later just to emphasize the strength of what we call the contract. And there’s a lot of, you know, today you can just ask, hey, who knows the most about this project? And you get a name, right? Because search isn’t just and that’s why if you scroll to the first start of our website, you’ll see that search and answers are together.

Because I hate the word search. We’re also ingrained to think that search is finding a word and a line in a file in a document, and that’s all we need. But sometimes we search for more abstract things like who can help me? What’s going on with this? When was my last meeting?

Do we have any questions left? Right. Those are the kind of things we’re looking for answers on. And Akooda can provide that. You were asking me about the specific contract benefits.

This is fun again. You know, Covid days. I have a customer. They look at the comp chart, they see a silo in the corner and they tell me, wow, this is great. Actually, all of these people started in the last three months and we’ve been in Covid times.

I haven’t been able to, you know, handhold them in the office. And I see that they’re siloed. They’re not communicating enough with the rest of the organization. So big win. I know exactly what I’m going to do after we get off this call or after using, you know, the very beta version of Akooda.

As a side note, I’ll say that a couple of weeks later, we spoke with another one of our early customers, saw another silo in the corner, and they said, this is great. The silo in the corner because these are my PhDs working on problems that I’m going to experience in 2026, 2027, and I need them to be focused on that specific thing. So I think there’s a lot that the contract can tell us today. You know, when we split this and today, of course, the products are a lot more mature. You can see this based on a specific customer, so you can see who the entire set of folks in my organization that are focused on that specific initiative, right from engineering, building custom solutions to enterprises all the way to who’s leading the sales, customer support.

It’s a great tool for sales teams to understand how things that are blocking their deal can be unblocked. It just helps us all be more cohesive and move a lot faster.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:11

Yeah, I want to. I remember I was listening to you talk about that, and I thought it was funny because like one of them, they wanted them siloed and the other one, they didn’t. And it’s funny, if they looked at the contrary and saw any of those siloed people talking to anyone else, they’d be like, don’t talk to anyone. We don’t want you talking to anyone. So it starts out with the com chart.

And that person’s super interested and you build from there. What was the next kind of evolution of Akooda in the product.

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