Before he built a company that photographs store shelves in seventy countries, Joel Bar-El sold toys. He imported them from Czechoslovakia and walked them into shops around Tel Aviv, a student trying to pay for life with a partner who would later become his wife. He has called it a learning experience.
He grew up in Tel Aviv, close to the sea; his father was a lifeguard. At Tel Aviv University he was drawn to astrophysics, started in the physics faculty, and found it too hard after the first year. So he rearranged his path, taking master's-level courses early and mentoring children through the Perach programme, which paid half his tuition. He graduated in 1996.
They went for a multinational as their first client, rather than small ones.
What almost nobody pictures when they hear about Trax is how slow the start was. Bar-El and Dror Feldheim, a Swiss-Israeli, founded it in 2010 in Singapore, with research in Tel Aviv. The idea: take photographs that field representatives snap of store shelves on a phone, and let image recognition count what is there, and what is missing.
The founders made a risky early decision. They went for a multinational as their first client, rather than small ones. Procter & Gamble was the first to approve the concept; Coca-Cola and the rest of the consumer goods industry followed. Bar-El later admitted the company paid a price for that choice. The first recurring client arrived only in mid-2013, three years in. Early money came only from family offices and wealthy individuals, not venture capital. That first round, around 2012, totalled about US$7.5 million.
The technology took a while to break through, he said. When it did, it grew fast. Warburg Pincus led a US$64 million round in 2017; Boyu Capital and GIC came in by 2019; in 2021 SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a US$640 million round at a valuation reported between US$2 billion and US$3 billion. Trax bought Lenztech, Shopkick and Planorama in 2019.
In May 2024 Bar-El and Feldheim stepped back from running the company, staying on the board. Bar-El has since started Swish, a computer-vision basketball company, using the same idea on a court instead of a shelf.
The pattern in his life is a man who keeps selling small things until a bigger one fits. For a founder the useful lesson may be patience: a first big client can cost you years, and still be the reason everyone else listens.