Team
The founding team
Civic Shield is currently founder-led. The team brings together experience in technology, finance, operations, scientific research and platform trust and safety. At this stage, the people building Civic Shield are also responsible for establishing the standards by which its work should later be judged.
- Founder and Executive Director
Boaz Benrush
Finance executive and technology entrepreneur, 25 years in mergers and acquisitions, private equity and corporate strategy.
- Formerly
- Head of Mergers and Acquisitions, KPMG Corporate Finance
- Head of Strategy, Papaya Gaming
- Companies
- EMM Investments — co-founder and board member
- Green Swan Labs — founder
- MusicBull — founder
- Education
- MBA in Finance, Tel Aviv University
- BA in Economics and Accounting, University of Haifa
- Licensed
- Certified public accountant, Israel
- Certified public accountant, United States
- Patent
- US12361212B2, co-inventor — extracting reliable structured data from machine-learning model outputs
- Co-Founder and Director of Finance and Operations
Oren Bar-Nir
Finance executive and investment professional, more than 25 years across corporate finance, investment management, strategy and operations.
- Career
- Began at KPMG
- Senior roles in complex corporate transactions, strategic advisory and corporate restructuring
- Advised on the privatisation of the Port of Haifa
- Companies
- EMM Investments — co-founder and board member. A New York private credit investment firm.
- Papaya Gaming, Green Swan Labs and MusicBull — financial and strategic leadership
- Education
- BA and MBA
- Licensed
- Certified public accountant, Israel
- CFA Program — Level III completed
Builds the financial controls, reporting discipline and donor accountability a public-benefit body has to be able to survive.
- Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Uriel (Ari) Naor
Senior full-stack engineer specialising in applied large-language-model and agentic systems.
- Experience
- Five years building large-language-model and agentic applications
- Seven years leading full-stack delivery
- Companies
- NUscale Tech — founder. An engineering practice working across seventeen countries on agentic orchestration, multi-agent systems, retrieval-augmented generation and workflow automation.
- Built
- OmniLaw.ai — legal research platform running retrieval-augmented generation over more than 500,000 documents
- Savera Intelligence — an AI system for child-safety detection
- Education
- MSc in Mechanical Engineering, Tel Aviv University
- BSc in Mechanical Engineering, Tel Aviv University
Leads architecture, capture and the evidence vault.
- Founder and Director of Research
Itamar Raz
Trust and Safety specialist and cultural entrepreneur, six years in platform policy enforcement.
- Trust and Safety
- Six years at one of the world’s leading social media platforms
- Member of its original Hebrew-language moderation team — one of the platform’s most complex and highest-risk language markets
- Policy enforcement, and the assessment of terrorism, hate speech and violent extremism
- Research
- Since October 2023, documenting and preserving evidence of online antisemitism, extremist networks and coordinated influence campaigns
- Combines Trust and Safety practice with open-source research and cultural analysis
- Cultural work
- Cultural entrepreneur and multidisciplinary artist
- More than twenty years building independent cultural initiatives and creative communities
- Including the gatherings that became the Midburn community
Leads research design and the classification taxonomy.
- Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer
Maya Beer
Neuroscientist and researcher, working in neuroimaging and cognition.
- Education
- BA in Neuroscience and Behavior, Columbia University
- Graduate training in neuroscience, Sorbonne
- Graduate training in neuroscience, Tel Aviv University
- Research
- Neuroscience, clinical research and neuroimaging at Columbia University and Tel Aviv University
- Current work focused on imaging and cognition
Brings the discipline of a research environment — protocol, measurement and the handling of evidence — to how the organisation is run.
Personal contact details are not published on this website. Organisational enquiries should be directed to Civic Shield rather than to individual founders.