Ori Goshen

Overview

Ori Goshen is an Israeli entrepreneur working in the field of artificial intelligence. He is one of the co-founders of AI21 Labs, which he started in November 2017 together with Yoav Shoham and Amnon Shashua^[2]. He also serves as the company's chief executive^[1].

Before AI21 Labs

AI21's own description of its leadership says Goshen has more than 15 years of experience in technology and product leadership^[1]. Before AI21 he co-founded Crowdx, a company in the network analytics field^[1]. The same account of his earlier work credits him with spearheading the development of VoIP^[1].

VoIP, short for Voice over IP, is the family of techniques that carries telephone calls as data over internet-style networks instead of over the dedicated circuits of the traditional telephone system. In practice it means a call is broken into packets, sent across a data network, and reassembled at the other end. It is the basis of most modern internet calling, and it became one of the defining pieces of communications infrastructure in the years when data networks replaced long stretches of the old telephone system.

Together, these two strands — network analytics and internet telephony — place his earlier career in the networking and communications side of the technology industry rather than in artificial intelligence, the field where his later company works.

Founding AI21 Labs

AI21 Labs was founded in November 2017 by Goshen, Yoav Shoham and Amnon Shashua^[2]. Starting a company with two academic and industry figures and taking the operating role himself fits a common pattern among technology founders: researchers supply the technical direction, while a founder with product and management experience runs the organisation.

His role at the company

Public descriptions of who runs AI21 differ in emphasis. AI21's about page lists Goshen as chief executive and lists Yoav Shoham as Chairman & Co-Founder^[1]. Wikipedia's article on the company, by contrast, describes Goshen and Shoham as co-CEOs^[2].

The two accounts agree that Goshen holds the chief executive role; they differ on whether Shoham shares that title or holds the chairmanship instead. For a reader trying to understand the company's structure, the useful point is that Goshen is the person identified in both accounts as running the company day to day, while Shoham is identified in both as a co-founder with a senior leadership position.

What his career shows

Goshen's path runs from founding a networking and analytics company, through work on internet telephony, to founding and leading an artificial intelligence company^[1][2]. Read together, the two parts of his record describe a founder who has moved between infrastructure problems — how data moves across networks — and the newer problems of building AI systems, and who has repeatedly taken the operating rather than the research side of the work.

His public profile is thin on personal detail: the available descriptions cover his founding roles, his executive title and the broad area of his earlier experience, and say little about his education or the specific positions he held inside other organisations. What can be stated with confidence is the founding of AI21 Labs in November 2017 with Shoham and Shashua, his earlier co-founding of Crowdx, his work on VoIP, and his position as the company's chief executive^[1][2].