# Gideon Mendels

> Gideon Mendels is the co-founder and CEO of Comet, the New York machine-learning platform that tracks, compares, and explains the experiments behind AI models. A computer scientist and NLP researcher by training, he built hate-speech detection at Google and ran speech-recognition research at Columbia before turning the messy, undocumented reality of model-building into a company. In 2024 Comet shipped Opik, an open-source LLM evaluation tool, putting Mendels at the center of the scramble to make AI agents reliable in production.

- **Role:** Co-Founder and CEO at Comet
- **Organizations:** Comet, Google, Columbia University, GroupWize, GoMatkot.com
- **Nationality:** Israeli-American
- **Education:** B.S. in Computer Science, Columbia University, M.Sc. in Computer Science, Columbia University
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads Comet, used by ML teams at companies including Ancestry, Cepsa, Etsy, and Uber, Raised $50M Series B (2021), reportedly $74.8M total funding, Launched Opik, an open-source end-to-end LLM evaluation and observability platform (2024)

## Career timeline

- **~2009** — Began career as a software engineer
- **earlier** — Founded GoMatkot.com, Israel's largest exporter of racquets and sports goods (acquired 2017)
- **grad school** — Researcher in the Spoken Language Processing Group at Columbia University, working on the IARPA Babel speech-recognition program for low-resource languages
- **post-grad** — Joined Google, working on hate-speech detection in YouTube comments and NLP
- **before Comet** — Co-founded GroupWize, training and deploying 50+ NLP models across 15 languages over billions of chat interactions
- **2017** — Co-founded Comet (Comet.ml)
- **2021-04** — Comet raised $13M Series A
- **2021-11** — Comet raised $50M Series B led by OpenView
- **2024-09** — Comet launched Opik, an open-source LLM evaluation platform

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads Comet, used by ML teams at companies including Ancestry, Cepsa, Etsy, and Uber
- Raised $50M Series B (2021), reportedly $74.8M total funding
- Launched Opik, an open-source end-to-end LLM evaluation and observability platform (2024)
- Built and deployed 50+ NLP models across 15 languages at GroupWize
- Contributed research to the IARPA Babel low-resource speech-recognition program at Columbia
- Built GoMatkot.com into Israel's largest racquet-sports goods exporter (acquired 2017)

## Latest updates

- **2024-09** — Comet launched Opik, a fully open-source LLM evaluation, tracing, and monitoring platform for RAG systems and agentic workflows.
- **2025-05** — Mendels speaking on 'The Rise of AI Agents: From Demos to Deployment,' focused on agent infrastructure, debugging, and evaluation.

## Links

- Website: https://comet.com
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gideon-mendels
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/Cometml
- GitHub: https://github.com/gidim
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX9GmL8cVn_ynG2xwebpKhenX3ccajG_2
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/cometdotml

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/gideon-mendels
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-04