Yuri Poliavich is one of those modern founders whose story makes sense only when it’s told through two lenses at once: the pressure of building in fast-moving tech, and the quiet patience of supporting education over many years. He is widely known in business circles as the founder of Soft2Bet, yet his public footprint also includes a philanthropic project focused on Jewish education that keeps showing up in serious community conversations.
In 2024, Uri Poliavich appeared on The Jerusalem Post’s “50 Most Influential Jews” list, in a profile that ties his childhood experiences in Ukraine to a later commitment to help Jewish schools and families access stronger education.
The interesting part is how these two lanes connect. In many profiles of business leaders, philanthropy feels like a separate chapter added at the end. With Poliavich, the themes overlap: systems, long-term thinking, incentives, and the kind of practical focus that shows up when someone has spent years working with products, teams, and measurable outcomes.
A background shaped by what was missing
The Jerusalem Post’s profile describes him as someone who grew up in Ukraine and lacked access to basic Jewish education early on, which later became a personal driver: making sure other children and families would have what he didn’t. That detail matters because it frames his later choices as more than a general interest in charity. It reads like a response to a real gap, shaped by lived context, then translated into a plan.
Public bios also call him Ukrainian-born and later connected to Israel-a life of moving between places and identities. In practical terms, that kind of background can foster a particular kind of mind: one attuned to infrastructure in community life, sensitive to just how fragile institutions can be, and with an instinct to construct things that hold up under stress.
This is also where his story becomes relevant beyond one community. Education is one of the few “slow” systems left in a world that rewards speed. Schools take years to improve, trust takes years to earn, and cultural confidence takes years to form. A person who chooses to invest there is choosing a long horizon.
Building a company around product thinking
On the business side, Poliavich is associated with Soft2Bet and with a push toward “gamification” as product strategy—using motivational design to shape engagement and user behavior. One of the company’s best-known product directions is MEGA, described in Soft2Bet materials as a “Motivational Engineering Gaming Application.”
Awards are easy to dismiss in tech because there are many of them. Still, they can signal what peers in an industry recognized as real execution. Soft2Bet’s own announcements describe MEGA winning “Product Launch of the Year” at the Global Gaming Awards EMEA in January 2025, alongside recognition for the company as “Platform Provider of the Year.” Industry coverage also reported Soft2Bet winning multiple categories at the same event.
Stepping back from the labels, the core idea is straightforward: product teams try to understand why people do what they do, then design experiences that support certain behaviors. The “niche” angle here is that motivation design is a transferable skill. The same discipline used to build a sticky digital experience—clear goals, feedback loops, community mechanics, consistency—can be applied ethically in education and identity-building when the aim is learning, belonging, and resilience.
A useful way to describe Poliavich’s “builder profile” is to focus on what this kind of work usually requires:
- Systems over slogans. Products succeed when the underlying structure is sound: data, iteration, user feedback, and disciplined execution.
- Long-term incentives. The best product decisions reward users for coming back with purpose, which mirrors how schools succeed through routines and reinforcement over time.
- Operational patience. Scaling a platform or an organization tends to be unglamorous: hiring, processes, compliance, and constant refinement.
That last point often gets missed in public narratives. People see “founder” and imagine big speeches. The real work is closer to maintaining a complicated machine that has to run daily, under scrutiny, while still improving.
A different kind of philanthropy
The philanthropic piece connected to Poliavich is strongly tied to the Yael Foundation, which is presented as founded by Uri and Yael Poliavich with a mission centered on access to high-quality Jewish education regardless of geography or community size. The Jerusalem Post’s 2024 profile describes the foundation’s impact as promoting Jewish education for 13,500 students across 35 countries.
As the foundation grew bigger, it even started to look more like an institution than a passion project. Reporting in 2025 described a significant budget increase-raising the annual budget from €25 million to €40 million-meeting the expanding needs. Another in-depth philanthropic industry report characterized the foundation as scaling rapidly since launching in 2020, with an emphasis on building capacity and professionalizing operations.
One of the clearest “tell” signs of serious education philanthropy is partnership behavior. When a project starts working with other major players, that typically is a sign that it has moved past symbolic support to coordinated and measurable work. In 2025, JNS reported on an initiative relating to renovating and expanding a Jewish school in Rome, funded by the Yael Foundation in conjunction with the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation.
Taken from a distance, these numbers and partnerships start to feel pretty abstract. Up close, they point to something very concrete: schools that can hire better staff, improve security, refresh curricula, support families, and give children a stronger daily environment. It’s the sort of investment that rarely trends online, yet it changes outcomes in quiet, durable ways.
Here are a few signals that make this kind of education work stand out as “built to last”:
- Consistency across countries. Supporting education across dozens of locations requires repeatable models and local trust.
- Budget decisions that match reality. Public commitments to significant annual funding suggest planning beyond short cycles.
- Partnership with established institutions. Collaborations like the Rome school project indicate alignment with long-term infrastructure work.
What makes this especially timely is the broader context: many Jewish communities have faced rising pressure in recent years, and education becomes both a cultural anchor and a practical support system. In that environment, investing in schools is also investing in continuity.
Why his story lands right now
There is a reason Poliavich’s profile resonates outside industry circles. It sits at the intersection of two modern realities:
First, the world increasingly runs on attention. Everyone competes for it: apps, media, brands, even institutions. People who understand motivation design hold an unusual kind of influence, because they understand how behavior is shaped.
Second, education is one of the few places where society still tries to shape attention toward meaning: learning, identity, history, ethics, language, community responsibility. When someone who understands “attention economics” chooses to invest in education, it creates an interesting contrast that feels relevant to the current decade.
The Jerusalem Post’s inclusion of Poliavich on its influential list positions him specifically through the lens of Jewish education support. That framing matters because it keeps the story grounded. It’s less about celebrity-founder energy and more about a person using resources and organizational skill to strengthen something that communities rely on when times get complicated.
In the end, the most compelling founder stories usually share one trait: they keep returning to a consistent principle. For Poliavich, the public record points to a principle built around opportunity—building systems that help people access something valuable, then making those systems stronger over time. Whether it’s a technology platform that demands constant iteration or an education initiative that demands patience, the through-line is the same: durable structures beat short bursts of attention.
