Amos Haggiag

Who is Amos Haggiag?

Amos Haggiag is the co-founder and CEO of Optibus, the public-transport software company he started, in his own words, ten years ago. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, is married with three children, and spends his time outside the company on extreme sports such as kite surfing and rock climbing. He comes from a technical background in math and computer science, and that combination of engineering rigour and an early obsession with a hard real-world problem has defined the company he built.

The origin of Optibus, as Haggiag tells it, predates the company by a decade. The story began around 2004, when his father — then the CFO of a large public-transport operator — knew first-hand how difficult it was to plan and run an efficient transit system from within. He came to Amos, a first-year university student who had just started studying math and computer science, and described how challenging it was to plan an efficient public transportation network. That conversation planted the seed for what would eventually become Optibus: applying serious computational firepower to a planning problem that most of the world's transit systems still handled with manual, ad-hoc methods.

Roughly a decade after that first conversation, Haggiag turned the idea into a company, and Optibus grew into what he and his SaaStock hosts describe as a global unicorn operating across many markets. At SaaStock USA 2024 and SaaStock Europe 2024 he spoke openly about the realities of that journey — the wins, the inevitable hard decisions, and the discipline required to serve customers in very different geographies with a single product. This page collects his recorded SaaStock talks, with transcripts, so founders can learn directly from how he built and scaled the business.

About Optibus

Optibus builds software for planning and running public transportation — the deeply technical, vertical SaaS layer that helps transit agencies and operators design routes, schedule vehicles and drivers, and run their networks more efficiently. It targets a problem Haggiag describes as universal: most public-transport systems in the world are difficult to plan and operate well, and the inefficiency is felt by operators, cities, and riders alike. Optibus turns that planning challenge into a software problem solvable with modern computation.

What makes Optibus notable as a SaaS story is its global footprint. In his SaaStock USA 2024 talk, Haggiag framed the company's reach in terms of scaling across 35 countries and 6,000 cities — a scope that is unusual for vertical, enterprise software, which more often sells into a single market such as the United States. Reaching that breadth forced the company to confront questions most SaaS companies never face: building one common product that can serve radically different markets, and deciding when going global is a strength rather than a distraction.

Across his appearances, the recurring themes are the mechanics of scaling that global organisation. In a fireside session with Alex Ferrara of Bessemer Venture Partners at SaaStock Europe 2024, Haggiag dug into which functions to centralise versus keep distributed — marketing, sales, customer success — how to manage R&D so one product can serve every market, how to identify and cultivate channel partners without building a large local presence in each region, and how M&A can play a role in winning markets. The throughline is a vertical-SaaS company that chose global breadth early and built the operating discipline to support it.

Key lessons from Amos Haggiag's talks

The best company ideas can come from someone who lives the problem. Optibus traces back to Haggiag's father, a transit-company CFO who understood the pain of planning an efficient public-transport system from the inside and brought that problem to his son. The lesson for founders is that proximity to a real operator's pain — not a trend — is what gives a vertical SaaS company durable conviction.

Decide deliberately when to go global versus staying focused on one or a few core markets. Most enterprise and vertical SaaS companies sell into a single geography, but Optibus chose to scale across 35 countries and thousands of cities. Haggiag's sessions stress that going truly global is a deliberate strategic choice with real trade-offs, not a default — and that timing matters as much as ambition.

Be intentional about what you centralise versus distribute. A core theme of his Bessemer fireside is sorting functions — marketing, sales, customer success — into those that should run centrally and those that should be local to each market. The same discipline applies to product and R&D: building one common product that can serve every market, rather than fragmenting into regional versions.

Use channel partners and M&A as deliberate growth levers. Rather than build a large headcount presence in every region, Haggiag points to identifying, cultivating, and managing channel partners as a way to reach markets efficiently, and to M&A as a tool for winning markets — practical mechanics for scaling globally without scaling cost linearly.