Elad Shoushan

Over the course of one lifetime, Elad Shoushan has built more careers than most people have jobs. He started his career as a professional basketball player in Israel and after getting injured transitioned to a software engineer at the likes of Intel and GE Healthcare. But in 2012, while earning his MBA at MIT Sloan, he walked away from all of it to chase an entrepreneurial itch — and he's been building billion-dollar venture backed businesses from nothing ever since.

His first company, Ready4, was born from his own frustration studying for the GMAT. An early iPhone adopter, Shoushan couldn't find a way to prep on the go, so he built one. Within a few years, Ready4's AI-powered adaptive learning apps became the number-one test-prep choice for millions of students — featured by Apple more than 2,000 times, used by 3.5 million learners across 150+ countries, and adopted by 100+ universities and education companies. Shoushan raised roughly $15M from leading US and Chinese investors including Square Peg Capital, ZhenFund, and Accomplice, and in 2019 sold the company to TAL Education Group — a rare cross-border exit to a publicly traded Chinese education giant.

Most founders would have stopped there. Shoushan was just getting started. He joined Anheuser-Busch InBev's innovation arm, Zx Ventures, as an Operating Partner — building a global team of product managers, designers, and engineers that helped launch 10+ digital products and generate over $100M in sales, while he sat on the boards of more than ten ventures. He then founded TaDa, ABI's on-demand beverage-delivery business, and scaled it from zero across eight Latin American countries and sixteen apps in under a year. That success propelled him to Global Chief Product Officer of ABI's direct-to-consumer business in Latin America — a portfolio generating more than $1 billion in annual sales, including the unicorn delivery platform Ze Delivery, which he helped grow to a dominant share of Brazil's e-commerce market.

Shoushan's instinct for spotting the next retail shift also made him a builder of the physical kind. He co-founded 1MRobotics — today rebranded as Xpand — which began as automated robotic ""dark stores"" for quick commerce and has since evolved into fully autonomous, unmanned stores: a complete store-in-a-box that ships inside a standard container, sets up in a day, runs with zero shrinkage, and operates anywhere, even off-grid. It's a glimpse of where retail is heading, and a reminder that Shoushan doesn't just talk about the future of commerce — he builds the infrastructure for it.

Today, Shoushan is the co-founder of a venture-backed fintech building credit access for the underbanked across emerging markets — applying the same playbook that has defined his career: find a real human problem, build a great product and a great team around it, and scale fast. Across EdTech, on-demand commerce, and fintech — and across the US, Latin America, Israel, China, and the Middle East — he has done what almost no founder has: turned zero into scale, again and again, through boom times and downturns alike.

Shoushan has shared stages and stories at CES, the ASU GSV Summit (where his company took home top honors), MIT, LearnLaunch, and in outlets like MIT Technology Review and Forbes. He's an angel investor and board member in startups spanning robotics, health, and consumer tech, and a longtime mentor at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, MassChallenge, and Microsoft's accelerator programs.

Shoushan holds an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and a B.Sc. in Information Systems Engineering, Cum Laude, from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Whether the audience is founders, Fortune 500 leaders, or investors, his message is the same: the distance between an idea and a billion-dollar business is shorter than you think — if you're willing to build.