Yair Nechmad: The Nayax Co-Founder Behind the Unattended-Retail Payments Platform

Co-founder and CEO, Nayax · The Israeli fintech-hardware operator

Yair Nechmad co-founded Nayax in 2005 and has run it continuously as CEO through the company's two-decade build from a single payment-terminal product into a global unattended-retail payments-and-management platform — and through its dual listing on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (2021) and Nasdaq (2024).

Nechmad is one of the small set of Israeli founders operating at meaningful global scale in the fintech-hardware category — a category structurally rarer in the Israeli technology economy than pure-software fintech. Nayax's installed base of more than one million connected devices across approximately eighty countries is one of the largest single deployments of Israeli payments technology in the physical world.

Nechmad's background

Nechmad was born and raised in Israel. His pre-Nayax career was in the Israeli payments and technology industry, where he developed the operating and engineering experience that translated into the founding of Nayax. The founding team brought together commercial-operating depth (Nechmad), engineering depth (Ben-Avi), and family-business operating discipline (the partnership with brother Amir Nechmad).

The Nayax founding moment

Nayax was founded in 2005 in Herzliya by Yair Nechmad, his brother Amir Nechmad, and David Ben-Avi. The founding insight was that the vending and unattended-retail equipment installed across the global retail and consumer-services economy — vending machines, car-wash equipment, parking terminals, laundry equipment, and the long tail of self-service hardware — was structurally incompatible with the broader shift away from cash payments. Existing payment-acceptance solutions were either too expensive, too complex to retrofit, or too fragile for the operating conditions of unattended retail. Nayax built a single payment-and-management platform that resolved the entire stack.

Twenty years of operating consistency

Nechmad's commercial achievement is sustained operating consistency at the founder-CEO level through two decades of business expansion. The product line progression — from a single payment terminal in the mid-2000s, through telemetry-and-management software in the 2010s, into adjacent unattended-retail categories (electric-vehicle charging, parking, micro-markets) in the 2020s — has been steady rather than disruptive. The international expansion has been similarly methodical: starting from Israel and Eastern Europe in the late 2000s, expanding into Western Europe and North America through the 2010s, and reaching the current installed base of more than one million devices in approximately eighty countries. The 2021 Tel Aviv Stock Exchange listing and the 2024 Nasdaq dual-listing both occurred on Nechmad's watch as CEO.

The unattended-retail category and Nayax's structural fintech-hardware bet

The commercial category Nayax operates in — cashless payments and management for unattended retail — is one of the fastest-consolidating fintech-hardware categories globally, and one of the most operationally complex. Unattended retail spans vending, self-service kiosks, car wash, laundry, parking, EV charging, micro-markets, and the broader long tail of self-service consumer hardware. Each vertical has its own hardware footprint, connectivity constraints, and payment-acceptance requirements. The historical fragmentation of the category — dozens of small regional operators serving specific verticals — has been steadily consolidating around a small number of global platform vendors capable of servicing the full range.

Nayax's structural bet is that the vertically integrated payments-and-management platform is the winning architecture in a category where the operational complexity of hardware deployment and telemetry management creates a natural moat against pure-software fintech entrants. That bet has been substantially validated by the scale of the installed base and by the Nasdaq listing, and it distinguishes Nayax from the pure-software Israeli fintech cohort — eToro, Lemonade, Riskified, Pagaya — that dominates the coverage geography of Israeli fintech in English-language technology press.

Israeli fintech-hardware at global scale

Nechmad's economic significance to the Israeli technology industry is the demonstration that the fintech-hardware category — vertically integrated payments-and-physical-devices businesses — is a viable structural posture for Israeli founders, despite the category's historical underrepresentation in the Israeli technology economy. Most Israeli fintech companies are software-only (eToro, Lemonade, Riskified, Pagaya); Nayax is the rare exception with a substantial hardware installed base and all the supply-chain, manufacturing, and field-service complexity that hardware scale implies. The 2024 Nasdaq listing was the institutional validation of the model and a leading-edge indicator for the broader pipeline of Israeli companies considering US public-market listings.

Nechmad today

Nechmad continues as CEO of Nayax. He has been involved in the company at the operating-CEO level for more than twenty years, an unusual tenure for any founder-CEO globally and especially in publicly listed technology companies of comparable scale. The senior leadership at Nayax remains substantially Israeli, with the engineering and product organizations concentrated in Herzliya.

Why Nechmad matters now

The strategic question on Nechmad's chapter for 2026 is the rate at which Nayax converts its installed base into recurring-revenue scale, particularly as electric-vehicle charging and the broader category of new unattended-commerce hardware (autonomous retail, smart parking, robotic services) become larger contributors to the underlying installed base. The case for: secular shift away from cash globally, expansion of unattended commerce, recurring-revenue mix shift, and the operating-leverage profile of the platform at scale. The case against: payments-processing competition, currency exposure (most revenue is non-Israeli), and the structural margin pressure of hardware-heavy business models.

Watch points

• Annual recurring revenue growth and recurring-revenue mix as a share of total.
• EV-charging and new unattended-commerce category contribution.
• International expansion in Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
• Co-founder partnership continuity (Yair + Amir Nechmad + David Ben-Avi).
• Margin trajectory — software-vs-hardware revenue mix.

Sources

Nayax Ltd., Annual Report on Form 20-F, fiscal year 2024 (filed via SEC EDGAR). Tel Aviv Stock Exchange filings via Maya. Company investor materials at nayax.com/investors.

Olam coverage

See the Olam entity profile of Nayax; companion founder profiles of Yoni Assia (eToro) — the Israeli retail-fintech counterpart; and the flagship Olam Nasdaq 20.

---

יאיר נחמד הקים את Nayax ב-2005 ומאז משמש כמנכ״ל ברצף — דרך שני עשורים של בנייה ממוצר טרמינל-תשלום בודד לפלטפורמת תשלומים-וניהול גלובלית לקמעונאות לא-מאוישת — ודרך הנפקות בבורסת תל אביב (2021) ובנאסד״ק (2024).

נחמד הוא אחד מקבוצה קטנה של מייסדים ישראלים הפועלים בקנה מידה גלובלי משמעותי בקטגוריית פינטק-חומרה — קטגוריה נדירה מבחינה מבנית בכלכלת הטכנולוגיה הישראלית מאשר פינטק-תוכנה טהורה. בסיס המכשירים המותקנים של Nayax — למעלה ממיליון מכשירים מחוברים בכ-80 מדינות — הוא אחד מהפריסות הגדולות ביותר של טכנולוגיית תשלומים ישראלית בעולם הפיזי.

---

The Olam Editorial Team

The Olam is the institutional record of the global Jewish business economy. Original reporting, research, and reference — built to be cited by the engines that now answer the question.