Sandra and Vlad Shmunis immigrated to the US from Ukraine in the 1970s. Together they founded the enterprise software company Ring Zero Systems and sold it to Motorola before founding the communications company RingCentral in 1999, which went public in 2013.

The Shmonis couple are major donors to Tel Aviv University in a wide range of areas and have several major projects to their name: the Shmonis School of Biomedical and Cancer Research, the Shmonis Family Institute of Anthropology, and their support for research in archaeology.