Oz finished his B.Sc in Electrical Engineering in 1990 at the Technion and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Tel-Aviv University in 1992. While in the Technion he co-founded Optibase, a hardware-software startup dedicated to image and video compression. While in Tel-Aviv University, he co-founded VCON (a spinout from Optibase) and built the first desktop video conferencing. In March 1999 Optibase had an IPO, followed by a secondary offering in March 2000 and is traded since on Nasdaq (OBAS). VCON had an IPO in Europe in late 2000 as well.
He joined the Israeli Intelligence Force in 1992, for 6 years he served as a Project Officer. During the first 4 years Oz served in San Diego, developing a real-time interpretation system for reconnaissance images. During 1996-1997 he lead the internal software team in the Israeli tech VISINT unit.
In 1998, Ran Oz was one of the co-founders of Peach Networks, which was sold to Microsoft for $80M in 2000.In 1999, he co-founded BigBand Networks. Main investors in BigBand were RedPoint and CRV. BigBand had an IPO in NASDAQ ($750M) in 2007. The company won two Emmy awards for technology innovations for the US digital cable market; it was sold to Arris in 2011.
In 2012, he co-founded Wochit. Main investors were RedPoint, Marker and GreyCroft. Wochit won the Gutenberg Prize and Digiday’s Best Video Technology Innovation award. Oz was the Finalist for the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award. In 2017, Oz founded EquityX.
Ran Oz has 50 registered/issued patents at the USPTO.
