Trax founder’s next venture has the NBA as its first customer
After building and selling Trax following its rise to a $3 billion valuation, Joel Bar-El is applying the same computer-vision approach to basketball through his new startup Swish.
Trax was one of the most prominent examples of the 2021 startup bubble, when private-market valuations and secondary transactions reached extraordinary levels. The company, founded by Joel Bar-El and Dror Feldheim, raised about $1.2 billion over the course of its existence, roughly half of it in secondary transactions that allowed early investors, employees and founders to sell shares.
At its peak, Trax was valued at more than $3 billion. In February 2022, the company announced that it had begun the process of going public on Nasdaq. But as interest rates rose and investors shifted away from high-growth technology companies, Trax, like many startups whose valuations had been built during the boom, was forced to change course.
In May 2024, Bar-El and Feldheim announced that they were stepping away from the company's day-to-day operations.
In an interview with Calcalist, Bar-El looks back on a journey that began with his childhood in Tel Aviv and took him through the creation of a multibillion-dollar startup that helped define the retail-tech industry. He now has two new projects: the sports-tech company Swish and the mentoring initiative Bar-El Center.
“At its peak, the company reached sales of $180 million,” Bar-El says. “The interest-rate increases in 2022 forced us to do everything we could to reach operating balance. That mainly meant laying off a lot of employees. By 2024, we had reached operating balance and realized that the best thing for the company was to sell it. Unfortunately, it wasn't to a large technology company, but to an investment fund that connected it with many other companies.”
Bar-El declines to comment on the price at which Trax was sold. According to estimates, however, the deal was worth many hundreds of millions of dollars, a significant decline from the company's peak valuation during the startup boom.
Bar-El began his career at Mint, where he worked alongside investors Shlomo Dovrat and Avi Zeevi. “I was sent by the company to Singapore to install a financial system,” he says. “What was supposed to be a six-month mission turned into four years. I got married there and my first son was born.”
Mint was later acquired by SunGard, where Bar-El became managing director of the Asia-Pacific region before moving to oversee operations in New York.
“After seven years in corporate, I founded my first startup, Tersus, a visual development language intended for non-programmers,” he says. “From there, I returned to Singapore and acquired the company Sentryi, which had gotten into trouble. Two years later, I sold it to an Australian company for about $10 million. That was my first official exit.”
He soon founded Trax with Feldheim.
The company's technology combined computer vision and artificial intelligence to give consumer-goods companies and retail chains a real-time view of what was happening on store shelves. Its system identified product availability, prices, shelf share and promotions, converting physical information from stores into digital data.
Dror came up with the idea, and you led the technological and managerial side, and Trax became a huge unicorn. How much money did you raise?
“We raised a total of about $1.2 billion, half primary and half secondary,” Bar-El says. “We made sure throughout that employees could also exercise shares in secondary transactions and participate in the company's success.”
He says Trax was also operating at the frontier of smartphone imaging technology when it was founded.
“When we founded Trax, a mobile phone was mainly used for calls,” he says. “We worked directly with Apple to adapt its camera modules to the image-processing technology we had developed. In essence, we broke ground and were pioneers in establishing an entire industry that is now called retail tech.”
Trax initially raised money from family offices and private investors in Singapore before attracting major institutional investors including Warburg Pincus, BlackRock and SoftBank.
“The first customer to approve the concept was Procter & Gamble, followed by Coca-Cola and the rest of the industry,” Bar-El says.
At its height, Trax had become a global operation.
“We reached a sales rate of about $180 million per year, with about 850 employees in 24 countries,” Bar-El says. “We worked with customers in 80 countries and digitized shelves in 3.5 million stores per month. Every major manufacturer approached us to get accurate insight from the physical world.”
But the environment that had allowed companies such as Trax to raise enormous sums at rapidly increasing valuations was changing.
“In 2021, after we raised the largest round of funding in the country's history at the time, about $700 million, I decided to vacate the CEO chair and move to the chairman's position,” Bar-El says. “At its peak, Trax was valued at about $3 billion.”
Bar-El says the decision was also personal.
“Being the CEO of a company of this size is a 24/7 job where you mainly deal with problems and troubles, and I felt that I had reached managerial exhaustion.”
Then came 2022.
“The sharp increase in interest rates caused investors to divert money to safer channels,” he says. “Sources of capital dried up, and the entire market had to move at once from a focus on growth to a rapid transition to profitability and operational balance.”
Trax had to adjust accordingly.
“To reach balance, we were forced to carry out waves of painful layoffs and reductions,” Bar-El says.
The transformation eventually led to a sale.
“We reached operational balance, and in mid-2024 a deal was signed to sell the company to a private fund called GEM,” he says. “The fund acquired several parallel companies and merged them into a global company under the Form brand. As soon as the sale was signed, I ended my role in the company.”
After more than a decade running Trax and another period as chairman, Bar-El took a break.
“I didn't want to just run another big company, but to return to technology, innovation and building from scratch,” he says. “From this break, two major initiatives were born that I am very excited about: Swish and the Bar-El Center.”
From retail shelves to basketball courts
Swish, founded in July 2025, is in many ways a continuation of the technological approach Bar-El developed at Trax.
“At Trax, we took the physical world of retail shelves and turned it into digital data,” he says. “At Swish, we do exactly the same thing but in the world of sports tech.”
The company uses computer vision and data collection technologies to extract real-time information from basketball courts and convert it into digital data. The system analyzes games, player movements and plays, generating information intended for coaching, broadcasting and analytics.
Bar-El says Swish's first client and partner is the NBA.
“Yes, our first client and partner is the NBA,” he says. “This is a crazy expression of trust in our technology and vision. Getting to work with a huge organization like the NBA right from the start shows the enormous potential of combining AI and computer vision in the world of sports.”
The first phase is aimed at schools, colleges and high schools. Under the company's business model, Swish will sell a sensor to each school as well as charge a usage fee for each player who wants access to the data.
Bar-El's other new venture is the Bar-El Center, a social-business initiative aimed at mentoring early-stage Israeli entrepreneurs.
“When I was a young entrepreneur at the beginning, I received a lot of help, mentoring and advice from experienced people in the industry,” he says. “I have already made a career and money, and it is time to pass it on.”
The center will provide entrepreneurs with mentoring, strategic consulting, investor connections and practical guidance on building companies, dealing with crises and expanding internationally.
“The goal is to take all the experience, mistakes and successes from my background and help the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs realize their vision,” Bar-El says.
