There's a moment Tomer Shor keeps coming back to.
His father had been living with hearing loss for years, and Tomer grew up thinking this was just how things were. His dad shouting from the other room, conversations that didn't happen in the car.
Then Tunefork — the company Tomer co-founded in 2017 — built a personalized audio profile for his father. They took a CD of classical music he'd loved before the injury. They ran it through their technology. Adjusted the frequencies to match exactly what his ears could still hear.
His father listened to it in his car for a week.
Then he wrote to Tomer. He was in disbelief. He said he hadn't realized there were cymbals in that song.
Tomer, who today is a product manager at Appcharge, tells this story with the ease of someone for whom the details have never faded. "He really liked music before the injury," Tomer says. "He kept listening, without realizing quite how much he was missing. And then he stopped."
The problem Tunefork set out to solve is larger than most people realize. Today, over 1.5 billion people globally live with some degree of hearing loss — a figure expected to keep climbing as a generation raised on earbuds ages. More than 430 million have disabling hearing loss severe enough to require intervention. Most never get it. The gap between people who need help and people who actually seek it out remains wide; hearing aid adoption only recently crossed 39% among people who need one, and that's in wealthy countries with good healthcare access.
Tunefork's original idea was to close that gap at the individual level. Conduct a proper hearing test on your phone — something that previously required a doctor's visit — then build a personalized audio profile that adjusted sound to your specific hearing. Not in a marketing sense. Actually personalized. Your ears, your frequencies, your music.
It was a clean idea. And it came from somewhere real.
Tomer served in Unit 8200 before founding Tunefork. The unit is where the seeds for a lot of Israel's best tech companies get planted — intense exposure to technology, complex systems, problems that require genuine ingenuity. When he left, he was looking for a problem that actually mattered to him. He found it at home.
His co-founder, Dr. Yoav Blau, had his own version of the same story — his wife was born with a hearing impairment. Two people from the same unit, both with personal reasons to care, both with the technical depth to try. They raised $2 million in seed funding from Triventures, ARC, and NEOME Group, plus grants from the Israel Innovation Authority and the EU's Horizon 2020 programme, and got to work.
"I started thinking about better solutions specifically for my father," Tomer says, "but then for everyone with hearing loss."
Between them, they built the core technology themselves — algorithms for hearing tests, audio adjustment engines, a system that could take a piece of music and reshape it around a person's specific hearing profile. It took years and a lot of the money they'd raised. When they finally had something to test, the first person they sat down with was Tomer's father.
The cymbals story wasn't the only thing that came out of that session. It was also, in some ways, where the business reality began to clarify itself. His father's hearing loss turned out to be severe, beyond the range where Tunefork's technology could meaningfully help. The right answer, the honest answer, was hearing aids.
"The biggest success of that startup," Tomer says, smiling, "was convincing my father to buy hearing aids."
Tunefork won competitions. It got meetings with Spotify, Apple Music, headphone companies, device manufacturers. The clinical trial at Sheba Medical Center returned strong results — its mobile hearing screening compared favorably to conventional audiometry in a professional environment. During COVID, when the whole world suddenly cared about audio quality on calls, there was a moment where it felt like everything might click.
It didn't.
The consumer hearing loss market was the original mission. The broader personalized audio play — the idea that everyone has slightly different hearing, even without clinical impairment — turned out to be a technology in search of a business. Cool product. No one willing to pay enough for it. The company pivoted to medical-grade hearing tests for hospitals and healthcare organizations, built real revenue, real customers across Israel, some traction in Europe. Then found an American acquirer who had the FDA relationships to take it into the US market.
In 2025, eight years after he started, Tomer completed the exit.
Most founders frame exits as success stories — everything worked out, lessons learned, silver linings everywhere. He sees it differently.
"We failed," he says, matter-of-factly. "We had a dream and we didn't fulfill it. The dream was to build a billion-dollar company around helping people with hearing loss. We changed course along the way, and the company we sold wasn't that company."
He pauses.
"But we built something real. People used it. It still exists. The acquirers can take it further than we could. And that's okay. You can hold both of those things at once."
What he can't stand is the LinkedIn version of entrepreneurship, where failure gets laundered into a learning moment until it stops being failure at all. "If you don't have a vision or any dreams, you won't fail," he says. "So you should have big dreams. And then you should be able to say, honestly, when you didn't reach them."
There's something almost stubborn about this. He's not being self-flagellating — he's clearly proud of what Tunefork built. He just refuses to let the exit narrative do the work of softening something that was genuinely hard.
After the exit, Tomer didn't immediately join another company. He knew he wanted to go into fintech next but he wanted to understand it properly before building anything. So he started meeting people, mapping the space, looking for a place to learn from the inside.
That search led him to Appcharge.
"I wanted to find a product position in a fintech company," he says. "To learn the industry. With the intention of eventually building something in it."
The category shift looks sharp on paper — from audio accessibility software to payments infrastructure for mobile gaming. But the logic is deliberate. "Money is something that involves all of our lives," he says. "A lot of people are scared of it, don't understand it. There's a huge gap that technology can solve."
He came in as a product manager. At Appcharge, he's since led the build of the company's MCP integration — the first major step into the agentic era. (He'll write about that separately; it deserves its own piece.) But ask him what drew him here in the first place, and he's disarmingly direct about it.
"I wanted to build a product," he says. "I didn't want to manage a startup. At Tuneork, eventually those became different things."
There's a version of Tomer's story you could tell that's about resilience, or reinvention, or the entrepreneurial spirit. He'd probably roll his eyes at all three.
The version he tells is simpler. He sees problems and he wants to fix them. He can't really stop doing it — he calls it a disease, the way you keep noticing things that are broken and thinking about how to fix them. A few weeks ago, he was up at 3am feeding his newborn. His wife needed a way to log breastfeeding sessions — weight before and after, duration, timing. The apps she'd found were either too complicated or missing features. So he opened a vibe-coding tool, described exactly what he needed, and had something working in 15 minutes.
"In the past," he says, "you had an idea, and then you needed someone to build it, and that took seven months before you could even test your assumptions. Now you can do it in a week."
His eyes light up.
"There's never been a better time."
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Tomer Shor is a Product Manager at Appcharge. The last product he rolled out was the company’s MCP, bringing the company into the agentic era. He co-founded Tunefork in 2017 and led the company through acquisition in 2025.
Charged is Appcharge's editorial publication, covering the people and craft inside the company and beyond.
