Avishai Abrahami
Israeli co-founder and chief executive of Wix; Unit 8200 veteran
| Avishai Abrahami
| |
|---|---|
| Nationality | Israeli |
| Occupation | Technology executive |
| Known for | Co-founder and CEO of Wix |
Avishai Abrahami is an Israeli technology executive and Unit 8200 veteran. He co-founded the website-building company Wix in 2006 and has been its chief executive since then. He also sits on the board of Monday.com.[1]
Unit 8200
Wix's board biography lists his military service as the "Israeli Defense Forces' elite computer intelligence unit (1990 – 1992)".[1] In 2016 Forbes published what it called a "never-before-told story" from that service. Abrahami was assigned to Unit 8200 and told to break into the computers of a hostile country. To get the computing power needed to decrypt the data, "He broke into the computers of two other hostile countries and hijacked their processing power to suck out the data held by the first target." Abrahami told the magazine: "If we had to do it with a computer researcher, it would have taken us a year. It took us a day."[2]
He also told Forbes: "Just from my generation, there are more than 100 guys from the unit that I personally knew who built startups and sold them for a lot of money." He said there had been "a team of ten people in one room in the unit. I call it the magic room, because all of them created companies where the average market cap is a half-billion dollars."[2]
Wix and other companies
According to Wix, Abrahami co-founded the software company AIT and was its chief technology officer from 1993 until its sale in 1997. He was later vice-president of strategic alliances at Arel Communications and Software (2004–06). At Wix he was co-CEO from 2006 to 2010, board chair from 2013 to 2016, and has since been honorary chair. He has been a director of Monday.com since 2012, and was a director of SodaStream from 2016 until its sale to PepsiCo in 2017.[1]
Globes reported that Wix was co-founded by Abrahami, his brother Nadav and Giora (Gig) Kaplan. Chief operating officer Nir Zohar met Abrahami through his brother Dror, "who served under Abrahami's command in the Israel Defense Forces intelligence unit 8-200".[3]
See also
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Wix.com, Board of Directors Wix Investor Relations, accessed 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Richard Behar, Inside Israel's secret startup machine Forbes India (from Forbes), 17 June 2016.
- ↑ Shlomit Lan and Omri Zerachovitz, The odd couple that runs a $12 billion company Globes, 30 June 2020.