Micha Benoliel

In 2011, Micha co-founded Open Garden to build a new generation of mobile operator leveraging the smartphone infrastructure and created the first off-the-grid messaging app FireChat. FireChat attracted international attention when it was used at way-off-the-grid Burning Man festival and by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong in 2014. Open Garden won the award in innovation during the 2015 SXSW festival for Connecting People and the Financial Times Boldness in Business in Technology.

At age 8, Micha taught himself how to code on a flight simulator in Basic on a Zenith PC that his father was using for accounting purposes. Subsequently, he wrote his first games on a Texas Instrument TI 99 4A, ATARI 512ST and Amiga 500. Micha has been a pioneer in VoIP and launched several telecommunications services in the past decade. He enabled Skype to start SkypeIn and SkypeOut, the innovation that scaled up its monetization and other premium Skype services.