Israel became the first country in the world to embrace the model of building open network infrastructure to enable mass adoption of electric vehicles and delivering transportation as a sustainable service. In 2008, the Israeli government announced its support for a broad effort to promote the use of electric cars, embracing a joint venture between Better Place and the Renault car company. Two years later, he officially launched Better Place. Inspired by a question at the 2005 World Economic Forum - “How do you make the world a better place by 2020?' - Agassi sought to answer this question with a pragmatic solution to free cars from oil, reduce harmful tailpipe emissions, and usher in an era of sustainable transportation. TopTier was a leading enterprise portal vendor when SAP acquired the company in April 2001 at a price of $400 million USD. Agassi served the company in various capacities including chairman, chief technology officer, and then CEO.

Upon graduation, Agassi founded TopTier Software (originally called Quicksoft Development) in Israel in 1992 and later moved the company's headquarters to California.

Shai Agassi is an Israeli entrepreneur best known as the founder and CEO of Better Place, an Israeli-based company which developed a model and infrastructure for employing electric cars as an alternative to fossil fuel technology.Īgassi (born April 19, 1968) was born in Ramat Gan, Israel, and attended one of Israel's premier universities, the Technion Institute of Technology, where he received a BA in 1990.

Agassi biography