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Chen Levanon closed on office space along the Embarcadero, found a Noe Valley home to lease and enrolled her two young children in a neighborhood Jewish preschool, but she wasn’t sure what to do with her things.

“The plan was to ship the furniture, clothes and kitchen stuff from Tel Aviv,” the 31-year-old CEO of ClicksMob, the mobile advertising powerhouse, said in early June.

Chen Levanon photo/rami zarnegarst

“But then I realized that with the waiting and the hassle of unpacking, I’d rather invite my employees over to see if there was anything they wanted or needed, and then decide if it was worth sending a container.”

The result of Levanon’s pre-departure open house: No container necessary. She and her husband, David, a strategic finance consultant, are furnishing their new Bay Area home from scratch.

With a woman in the CEO position, ClicksMob stands out from the “army guys” culture of many Israeli startups. Another example: ClicksMob’s Tel Aviv office has a higher proportion of female employees than most of its counterparts — almost 75 percent of the company’s staff are women.

“I think a startup is like a newborn,” said Levanon, who learned she was pregnant shortly after becoming CEO.  With two children under the age of 2 and only 14 months apart, she is well aware of the challenges.

And certainly she’s seen growth in both her children and the company she leads. In fact, ClicksMob’s revenues last year increased exponentially, by 900 percent, and catapulted the startup into the ranks of Forbes’ 30 most promising companies for 2015. ClicksMob reported revenues of approximately $10 million in 2014. 

“The early stage is formative for a company’s development, so a healthy work environment, from recruitment to office culture, is key to building the company you imagine,” said Levanon.

The nexus of mobile advertisers and digital content providers in San Francisco drove Levanon’s move to the city. The company is designating San Francisco as its new global headquarters but will retain its offices in Tel Aviv and New York.

Levanon anticipates the San Francisco office should have a staff of 15 by the end of the year.

At this point in time, remaining in Tel Aviv was not an option for the young CEO. “If the children were older I would be able to commute to California every four or five weeks,” Levanon said. “This move is about spending more time with the kids and our important clients.”

ClicksMob has developed a differentiated model for activity-based online advertising adapted for the world of mobile. The company’s proprietary software is designed and updated in Tel Aviv, but the businesses it serves are largely based in the Bay Area.

“We have developed a platform so that at any given time, both advertisers and publishers can go on our application and see how we perform,” Levanon explained. “We have the technology that knows who is taking the ad, who is clicking on it and who is placing it. We know to close the cycle from the time users click on the ad until they engage and purchase a product or service.”

This is not the Levanons’ first sojourn in the United States.

She grew up in Haifa and attended Brandeis University outside Boston; a long-distance runner; she was awarded a full athletic scholarship. After graduation, Levanon obtained her first professional internship in finance at Bear Stearns, then moved on to the Israel desk at Lehman Brothers, where she helped identify promising Israeli tech ventures.

Her husband also studied in Boston, where his father served as Israel’s consul general.

The couple is happy to settle on the West Coast rather than back East. “There’s no real winter in California and I am looking forward to strolling year-round in the city with the family and going on some of the great hikes that you can do less than an hour’s drive from San Francisco,” Levanon said.

As far as juggling the demands of a rapidly growing startup along with a dynamic young family, Levanon obviously isn’t fazed.

“It’s been a wonderful journey being a mother and chief executive,” she wrote on the ClicksMob website. “But it hasn’t been easy,” she continued.

“The work culture at startups is fast-paced, incredibly demanding and — especially in my field — tends to be male-dominated. It has taken careful steering through the industry’s ‘boys club’ to successfully lead the company and to balance my ambition with all the other aspects of who I am.”