Avi Naor: The Amdocs Co-Founder And Philanthropist

Avi Naor is one of three co-founders of Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX) — the Israeli-founded customer-experience and billing-systems software company that became one of the largest Israeli-headquartered technology companies by revenue and one of the longest-tenured Nasdaq-listed Israeli technology positions. He is also one of the most active Israeli technology-era philanthropists, with a defining focus on traffic safety that traces to the 1995 death of his son Ran in a road crash — the personal tragedy that led directly to the founding of Or Yarok (Green Light) in 1997, now Israel's largest and most institutionally embedded traffic-safety NGO. Hebrew Wikipedia presence. Limited English Wikipedia footprint. This is the canonical English profile.

Founder Snapshot

• Company: Amdocs Limited (NASDAQ: DOX)
• Role: Co-founder (1982); former President and CEO (1995–2002)
• Sector: Customer experience, billing, operations support systems for global telecommunications carriers
• Born: 1946, Israel
• Co-founders: Morris Kahn (South African-born Israeli businessman, then owner of Golden Pages / Yellow Pages Israel) and Boaz Dotan (technical co-founder)
• Amdocs founded: 1982, initially as a spinout from Golden Pages to computerize directory publishing
• Amdocs IPO: June 1998 on NASDAQ; raised approximately $210 million at a $1.7 billion valuation
• Amdocs current scale: ~$5 billion revenue, ~30,000 employees, market capitalization in the $9–11 billion range
• Philanthropy: Or Yarok Association for Safer Driving in Israel (founder, 1997); Naor family philanthropic vehicle
• Recognition: Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Special Contribution to Society (2011) — one of the highest civilian honors awarded by the State of Israel

Amdocs by the Numbers

• Founded: 1982, Ra'anana, Israel
• First customer: Southwestern Bell (later SBC Communications, now AT&T) — the anchor relationship that defined the Amdocs commercial model
• IPO: June 19, 1998 on NASDAQ under ticker DOX; one of the longest-tenured continuously listed Israeli technology positions on the exchange
• Amdocs today: Roughly $5 billion in annual revenue; approximately 30,000 employees across 90+ countries
• Anchor customers: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, BT, Bell Canada, Comcast, Charter, Telefonica — a customer base spanning the world's largest tier-one carriers and cable operators
• Guernsey domicile: Legal parent domiciled in Guernsey since IPO; principal operations in Israel, India, the United States, Cyprus, and the Philippines

Avi Naor: From Amdocs To Or Yarok

Avi Naor is one of three co-founders of Amdocs, the customer-experience and billing-systems software company that became one of the foundational Israeli technology exports and one of the longest-tenured Nasdaq-listed Israeli technology positions. He served as President and CEO of Amdocs from 1995 through 2002 — the period spanning the company's transition from private carrier-software vendor to publicly traded global platform. Since his 2002 departure from operating leadership, Naor has been one of the most consequential Israeli technology-era philanthropists, with a defining focus on traffic safety through Or Yarok.

How Was Amdocs Founded?

Amdocs was founded in 1982 as a computerization initiative inside Golden Pages, the Israeli Yellow Pages publisher then owned by Morris Kahn. Kahn — a South African-born Israeli entrepreneur — needed a software platform to modernize directory publishing operations. He recruited Avi Naor and Boaz Dotan to build it. The three of them co-founded Amdocs as a standalone entity to commercialize the software beyond the Golden Pages parent.

The pivot from directory computerization to carrier billing came through the first Amdocs customer: Southwestern Bell, the US regional Bell operating company later renamed SBC Communications and eventually the acquirer of AT&T. Amdocs won the contract to computerize Southwestern Bell's directory operations and then extended into the adjacent — and vastly larger — carrier billing and customer-care systems that ran the actual telephone service. That extension defined the company's commercial trajectory.

By the early 1990s Amdocs was building customer-care and billing platforms for tier-one carriers across the United States and Europe. The business scaled through the deregulation of national telecommunications monopolies, the arrival of mobile telephony, and the transition of carrier IT infrastructure onto commercial software platforms.

What Was Naor's Role as Amdocs CEO?

Naor was appointed President and CEO in 1995. His tenure spanned the operational scaling that took Amdocs from a private mid-sized Israeli software vendor to a Nasdaq-listed global platform with tier-one carrier customer relationships. The signature transaction of the period was the June 1998 NASDAQ IPO, which raised approximately $210 million at a $1.7 billion valuation and made Amdocs one of the earliest Israeli-headquartered technology companies to reach the US public markets at institutional scale.

The IPO period was followed by the dot-com peak and subsequent collapse. Amdocs's carrier-software revenue base — anchored in multi-year contracts with tier-one operators — proved substantially more resilient than the consumer-internet cohort. The company retained its listed status and continued to grow customer relationships across the global carrier base throughout the 2001–2002 downturn.

Naor stepped down as CEO in 2002, transitioning day-to-day leadership to a successor executive team while the company continued to operate as a listed platform with substantial Israeli engineering operations. Amdocs today is one of the largest single employers of Israeli software engineers, with its principal R&D operations concentrated in Ra'anana and Petah Tikva.

Why Did Avi Naor Found Or Yarok?

The founding story of Or Yarok is a personal one. In November 1995, Naor's 20-year-old son Ran Naor was killed in a head-on collision on Route 4 in central Israel, caused by a driver who had crossed into oncoming traffic. Ran was a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces at the time of his death.

Israeli road fatalities in the mid-1990s were running at rates dramatically above OECD peer levels, driven by a combination of aggressive driving culture, weak enforcement, inadequate road infrastructure, and limited public campaigning on driver behavior. Naor spent the two years following Ran's death researching the structural drivers of Israeli road fatalities and the institutional models that had reduced fatality rates in comparable jurisdictions.

In 1997, Naor founded Or Yarok — Hebrew for "Green Light" — as a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing road fatalities and injuries in Israel through policy advocacy, driver education, public awareness campaigns, and institutional reform of Israeli traffic-safety infrastructure. The organization operated from the outset with substantial personal capital from Naor and with a policy-influence model aimed at legislators, the Ministry of Transportation, the police traffic division, and the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation.

What Has Or Yarok Accomplished?

Or Yarok is now the institutional Israeli civil-society organization on traffic-safety policy. Its footprint spans public campaigning, research, education, and legislative advocacy. The organization operates the Ran Naor Research Institute for Road Safety, a research arm producing data on Israeli driver behavior, fatality patterns, and comparative-jurisdiction analysis.

The policy footprint is substantial. Or Yarok has been the principal external actor behind multiple rounds of Israeli traffic-safety legislation, including changes to seatbelt requirements, child-restraint laws, drunk-driving enforcement, and licensing procedures. The organization's public-campaign work — road-safety advertising, television spots, and school-based education programs — has run continuously for more than two decades.

Israeli road fatalities per 100,000 residents fell from approximately 8 in the mid-1990s to roughly 4 in recent years — a reduction that reflects a combination of infrastructure investment, enforcement, and the sustained public-awareness work in which Or Yarok has been the largest civil-society actor. The organization is one of the most durable institutional Israeli civil-society builds of the post-1990s technology-wealth generation.

What Recognition Has Naor Received?

In 2011, Naor was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Special Contribution to Society — one of the highest civilian honors granted by the State of Israel. The award citation recognized both his role as an Amdocs co-founder and the sustained institutional work of Or Yarok, framing the two career chapters as an integrated pattern of national contribution.

Naor is also a substantial philanthropist across Israeli education, health, and social-service infrastructure through the Naor family philanthropic vehicle, with recurring positions on lists of the most active Israeli philanthropists of the technology-wealth generation.

Why Avi Naor Matters

The Amdocs founder cohort — Kahn, Naor, and Dotan — built one of the foundational Israeli technology companies of the carrier-software era. Amdocs pre-dates the modern Israeli venture industry by more than a decade. Its 1998 IPO pre-dates the Check Point IPO by two years and the ICQ sale to AOL by a matter of days. The company established two of the operational patterns that would define subsequent Israeli technology: anchor US customer relationships at institutional scale, and a Nasdaq listing structure that would become the reference architecture for Israeli founders reaching public markets.

Naor is the canonical operating co-founder behind that build. His post-Amdocs career — anchored by Or Yarok — is one of the reference examples of technology-wealth-to-civil-society-institution conversion in the Israeli context, alongside the parallel philanthropic infrastructure built by figures including Morris Kahn (the Kahn Foundation and SpaceIL), Marius Nacht (aMoon Fund and multiple Israeli health-tech vehicles), and the Wertheimer family (industrial-education infrastructure in the Galilee).

The English-language coverage of Naor's career and Or Yarok's institutional footprint has been thin relative to the operational and civil-society scale of both. This profile begins to correct that.

What to Watch in 2026

• Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX) revenue trajectory and any strategic-portfolio decisions as the global carrier customer base transitions through AI-and-cloud-native infrastructure buildouts.
• Or Yarok's continued policy engagement on Israeli road-safety legislation, particularly around emerging vehicle-technology categories and enforcement infrastructure.
• Naor family philanthropic activity across the broader Israeli civil-society landscape.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Avi Naor?
Israeli entrepreneur and philanthropist; co-founder of Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX) in 1982 with Morris Kahn and Boaz Dotan; President and CEO of Amdocs from 1995 to 2002; founder of Or Yarok, Israel's largest traffic-safety NGO, in 1997.

When was Amdocs founded and when did it go public?
Amdocs was founded in 1982 as a Golden Pages spinout. It listed on NASDAQ under ticker DOX in June 1998, raising approximately $210 million at a $1.7 billion valuation.

Why did Avi Naor found Or Yarok?
His 20-year-old son Ran, a serving IDF soldier, was killed in a head-on road collision on Route 4 in November 1995. Naor founded Or Yarok in 1997 as a permanent institutional response to Israel's road-fatality rates.

What is Or Yarok?
Or Yarok (Green Light) is Israel's largest traffic-safety NGO. It operates policy advocacy, public campaigning, driver education, and research (through the Ran Naor Research Institute for Road Safety), and has been the principal civil-society actor behind multiple rounds of Israeli traffic-safety legislation.

Did Avi Naor win the Israel Prize?
Yes. He received the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Special Contribution to Society in 2011 — one of the highest civilian honors granted by the State of Israel — for the combination of his Amdocs founder role and his Or Yarok institutional work.

Sources

Amdocs Limited annual reports (NASDAQ: DOX) filed via SEC EDGAR. Or Yarok institutional materials. Israel Prize records (Ministry of Education). Israeli business press coverage of the Amdocs IPO and the 1995–1997 Or Yarok founding period.

Olam coverage

See Olam coverage of the Israeli carrier-software and telecommunications-technology export layer, the philanthropic infrastructure of the Israeli technology-wealth generation, and adjacent profiles including Yossi Vardi, the Wertheimer family, and the flagship Olam Nasdaq 20.

Updated July 2026.