Pini Yakuel

Co-Founder & CEO · Optimove

Marketing technology — customer data platform and AI marketing orchestrationTel Aviv, Israel

Pini Yakuel is co-founder and chief executive of Optimove, the Tel Aviv customer-marketing platform he started as a two-person business and has grown to more than 500 staff serving over 1,200 brands, including Sephora, Staples, Entain and bet365. The company's argument, which he has made consistently for more than a decade, is that marketing should be organised around the customer rather than around the campaign - predicting what an individual will do next and orchestrating across channels accordingly, rather than pushing scheduled sends at segments.

Last reviewed: Sep 19, 2026

Pini Yakuel

Co-Founder & CEO Optimove

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Pini Yakuel is co-founder and chief executive of Optimove, a customer-marketing platform built around a single contrarian premise: that the unit of marketing should be the customer, not the campaign. Where conventional marketing automation schedules sends to segments, Optimove models each individual’s likely next behaviour and orchestrates across email, SMS, push, web, WhatsApp and ad networks from that prediction. He started the business with one other person and has grown it to more than 500 employees across Tel Aviv, New York, London, Dundee, São Paulo and Tallinn, serving over 1,200 brands including Sephora, Staples, Entain, bet365 and FDJ. He is unusually visible as an advocate for the idea itself, writing regularly for CMSWire and Retail Customer Experience and publishing in Forbes, TechCrunch and Entrepreneur.

Career Highlights

  • Co-founder and chief executive of Optimove, headquartered in Tel Aviv with offices in New York, London, Dundee, São Paulo and Tallinn.
  • Grew the company from two people to more than 500 employees and over 1,200 brand customers.
  • Raised the company’s first outside capital in September 2016: $20 million from Israel Growth Partners, at a reported $100 million valuation.
  • Acquired the DynamicMail business from PowerInbox in 2018 and the real-time data streaming vendor Axonite in early 2020.
  • Positioned the platform early on predictive AI for customer behaviour, and more recently around the company’s “Positionless Marketing” framing.
  • A regular contributor on customer experience and digital marketing at CMSWire and Retail Customer Experience, and published in Forbes, TechCrunch and Entrepreneur.

Professional Journey

Yakuel took an MSc in Industrial Engineering and Management at Tel Aviv University — a discipline that is, at root, about optimising systems with people in them, which is a reasonable description of what Optimove sells. What he did between graduating and founding the company is not described in any source available, an unusual gap for a founder of his visibility.

The business began as a two-person operation under the name Mobius Solutions, with its first software released as Customer Value Maximizer. The proposition then was narrower than it is now: use historical transaction data to model customer lifetime value and churn risk, and let those models decide who gets contacted about what. That was contrarian at the time, when marketing software was overwhelmingly organised around campaign scheduling and list management, and it is the argument Yakuel has continued to make in public ever since — that customer-led beats campaign-led, and that the CRM platform rather than the email tool is the right place to put the intelligence.

The company was unusual in Israeli technology for how long it went without institutional money. Its first outside round came in September 2016: $20 million from Israel Growth Partners, at a reported $100 million valuation, by which point it was already a working business with paying enterprise customers. Offices followed in London in 2015 and New York in 2016. Two acquisitions filled out the stack — DynamicMail, bought from PowerInbox in 2018 to bring email execution in-house, and Axonite, a real-time data streaming vendor, in early 2020, which mattered because prediction is only useful if the data arrives fast enough to act on.

Optimove found a particularly strong position in gaming and gambling, where retention economics are brutal and customer-level modelling is the whole game — Entain, bet365, Kindred, Penn Entertainment and FDJ are all named customers — and used that to move into retail and consumer brands such as Sephora, Staples and Jabra. The company maintains a dedicated gaming revenue organisation in its leadership structure.

Its current positioning is “Positionless Marketing”, the claim that marketers should not be confined to channel-specific roles because the platform can orchestrate across all of them; the company applies the same term to its own staff. Yakuel continues to lead it, and to argue the case in print more than most founders of comparable companies do.

Education

Tel Aviv University

MSc, Industrial Engineering and Management