Ilan Zerbib

Sapiom is building a developer-first financial OS that makes it safe and easy for AI agents to transact.

Led engineering for Shop Pay, Shopify’s highly strategic consumer product, and founded and launched Shop Cash in 2022—a dual-component product introducing a buyer loyalty program, 'Shop Cash Back,' and a sophisticated merchant-focused ads platform, 'Shop Cash Offers.'

Earny is a consumer advocate autonomous agent that helps 4.5M shoppers maximize their spending through automatic price protection. (acquired in March 2021). I founded Earny to help users make intelligent shopping decisions by leveraging proprietary price-tracking technology and pricing trends to get automatic refunds on price drop, add items to watchlist, and earn cashback. The company raised $14M in funding (Mayfield, Sweet Capital, Science Inc., Comcast Ventures), received national press coverage (Good Morning America, CNN, Forbes, WSJ, HuffPo, etc.), was named a "Top 50 Startup to Watch" by Business Insider, and the iOS app trended for several weeks as a Top 10 in the finance category. At Earny I built and led the engineering organization, vision, and roadmap. Tech Project highlights: ○ Architected and led build of product from scratch including data structures, datastores with 1PB of data, and scalable distributed systems that supported 4M users, up to 1M new signups per month, and 1.5M MAUs. ○ Led build of a proprietary price tracking technology and infrastructure capable of checking prices of 23M unique items every 30 minutes through scraping at the top 30 US retailers, with 6000 price checks per second and 150M price change detections per month. ○ Built email infrastructure to handle near real-time synchronization of 3M+ inboxes processing 400M+ emails per month and 10000 inbox syncs per second at peak. ○ Developed a unique proprietary scraping technology that accesses over 1M connected Amazon accounts to extract purchasing data in real time. ○ Scaled infrastructure/product to enable parsing of 100M shopping receipts and tracking for 180M purchases ($6B value). ○ Partnered on project with MIT’s Analytics Lab to identify machine learning algorithms to predict optimal time for submitting claims to retailers or credit card issuers. Earny also partnered with Yahoo! Mail, with integration for tens of millions of Yahoo! users.

Hashsnap was a relationship app built as a platform for users seeking serious relationships. We identified the market opportunity for a relationship app designed to connect users in an authentic way without superficiality, with the ambitious goal of changing the way users seek real relationships while changing society’s behavior in online dating. I built and led the engineering team and drove product development efforts to go from concept to a functional iOS product in three months. Hands-on work included Swift development, design of the database model and architecture, and writing matching algorithms. Product features included a requirement for taking live photos and videos through the app camera with daily themes embedded into photos.

Conducted public safety missions and contributed to cybercrime prevention.

Partymood was a startup mobile payment and loyalty management system for bars and restaurants. I co-founded Partymood with a mission to enable users to pay for orders table-side and accumulate points on payments that could be converted to free drinks or discounts within a venue network. My work included build of an Android app (and its technical infrastructure and backend) that won first place at the 2013 “Pimp My Ad” challenge organized by Criteo.

As a Reservist I served as a Squad Leader for anti-terrorism patrols in the 68th Artillery Regiment.

Specialization: Entrepreneurship and Innovation