In July 2020, Karim Galil announced that his company was changing businesses. Mendel would make tools that other companies could build with. He reached for a gold-rush analogy: the firm would sell the shovels. For a founder who had moved to Silicon Valley with a particular product in mind, this was a consequential revision. The technology would stay. The question of who should use it, and what they should build, had become much more open.
There is a particular kind of confidence involved in doing this publicly. A founder spends years persuading people that a plan deserves their money and time. Then, with those people still watching, he explains that part of the plan has changed. Galil’s announcement offers a useful way into his character: committed to the underlying work, willing to redraw the business around it, and sufficiently impatient to describe the existing plumbing in language unsuitable for a plumbing advertisement.
His career contains the familiar startup ingredients: an accelerator, a co-founder, successive funding rounds. The interesting part is how often his account returns to other people. Someone had to take the first chance on him. Specialists had to learn to work together. Customers had to find a reason to keep paying. The founder gets the photograph. The business requires rather more company.
The person who took the first chance
Before Mendel, Galil had founded KryptonWorx. Later, in the United States, he faced the possibility of having to leave the country. Acceptance into a startup development program changed that prospect. He remembers the acceptance as a turning point, an opening arriving when the available options appeared to be narrowing.
He gives particular credit to investor Mark Goldstein, whom he encountered through IndieBio. Galil describes a relationship extending beyond a cheque: guidance, time, and help with the decisions of an early company. His recollection is affectionate. Goldstein treated him like a son.
That detail complicates the usual picture of founder grit. Galil values persistence, but his own account leaves room for dependence, gratitude, and good advice. Determination still needs somebody willing to answer the phone. The early supporter in this story does more than applaud the ambition; he helps the founder figure out what to do with it.
“Move fast. The faster you fail, the faster you will succeed.”
Karim Galil, January 2017
A company needs a shared language
By January 2017, Galil was already explaining Mendel publicly through IndieBio. Asked what entrepreneurship had taught him, he gave a brisk answer about speed and failure. Asked about the difficult part, he described the problem of getting different specialists to understand one another. The two answers belong together. It is difficult to move quickly when colleagues attach different meanings to the same conversation.
Wael Salloum, his co-founder, brought a background in computational linguistics, including a doctorate from Columbia University. Mendel’s early partnership put different kinds of expertise inside the same business. That arrangement sounds straightforward in a company biography. In practice, the founder’s own description makes translation part of the job.
It is an unglamorous challenge with considerable consequences. A specialist can be right within a discipline and still struggle to explain what a colleague needs to build. Galil identified that friction early. A multidisciplinary team earns the adjective only when its members can make something together; assembling a distinguished list of qualifications is the easier administrative task.
The awkward guest at the AI party
Later in 2017, Galil published an essay challenging extravagant claims about artificial intelligence. He wrote as somebody regularly invited to AI events who found the prevailing salesmanship irritating. His objections were pointed: impressive vocabulary, ambitious promises, and conspicuously thin proof. He also admitted that event organizers could find him frustrating.
This is an appealingly inconvenient trait in a person selling AI. The industry provides abundant opportunities to sound visionary. Asking whether a claim survives inspection is less likely to improve the mood at a conference reception. Galil’s argument was that exaggerated promises could make a subsequent, more modest proposition harder to believe.
There is a business calculation inside that irritation. Buyers remember disappointments. A company entering the same category inherits some of the suspicion created by earlier sellers. His essay reads as both an objection to puffery and an argument about the cost of acquiring trust. The difficult question for any founder taking this position is whether the same standard will be applied to his own pitch.
The shovel decision
The July 2020 announcement gave that skepticism a commercial direction. Galil explained that Mendel had spent three years on research and development. The team had come to see applications for its underlying technology beyond the product it had originally set out to sell. A beta platform had quietly launched in February. By July, he was ready to describe the change in public.
The logic was straightforward: one company could not build every useful application. Making the underlying capability available to others would let more businesses put it to work. Galil compared the ambition with Twilio, a company whose tools let developers add communications capabilities to their own software.
For the founder, this meant accepting a different kind of visibility. Infrastructure often does its work behind somebody else’s interface. The customer’s product receives the attention. The supplier must become useful enough to remain underneath it. Galil was volunteering for that less conspicuous position, betting that usefulness could travel further than a single application.
The original product gives the technology a first job.
The platform makes the underlying tools available to other companies.
The money comes with more work
In June 2021, Mendel announced an $18 million Series A led by DCM. Existing backers also participated. Galil reported a fifteenfold revenue increase after the platform became commercially available and said every pilot had converted into a multiyear agreement. Those were company-reported figures from that moment, describing a business beginning to make its platform argument in commercial terms.
In April 2022, a $40 million Series B followed, led by Oak HC/FT with DCM participating again. The stated uses included enlarging the AI and engineering teams and expanding the commercial organization. The two rounds were less than a year apart. A funding announcement can be read as an arrival; the proposed spending reads more like a longer list of responsibilities.
That distinction matters in Galil’s story. The pivot created a proposition other businesses could buy. Financing gave Mendel more resources to pursue it. A larger engineering team still needed direction, and a larger commercial team still needed customers. The new capital changed the scale of the assignment while leaving the practical demands of running a company very much in place.
A conversation beyond the pitch
Galil also became a podcast host. One December 2022 episode of the Patientless Podcast brought him and Salloum together with Leslie Lamport, the 2013 Turing Award winner. Their announced subjects included mathematics, career history, and distributed and concurrent systems. It is an unusually technical guest list for anyone hoping merely to fill forty minutes with founder encouragement.
The pairing gives the profile another dimension. Galil could appear as the executive explaining his business, then sit across from somebody whose career was built on foundational computer science. Hosting creates space to ask questions. In a field where executives are rewarded for sounding certain, a conversation with a researcher offers a different public role.
The work of building the company continued through large technology partnerships. Mendel worked with Google Cloud on its platform in 2024. By April 2025, it had migrated to AWS infrastructure. Galil emphasized the value of access to people who could help the team make decisions and execute quickly. The recurring preference is practical: find collaborators who understand the task and can help move it forward.
The other business he thinks about
Away from the company, Galil is an avid kitesurfer. Egypt is a favored place to get on the water, and visits to the team there provide an opportunity. He has even entertained the idea of opening a surf shop. After years of sophisticated software, the appeal of a business associated with wind and boards is easy to appreciate.
There are smaller clues to his habits, too. He likes the concise explanations in Axios. He remembers wanting a CD player as a child and now considers the technological world his own children will inherit. The future interests him beyond the next product release. Technology also changes how people spend their days and how they stay connected.
He teaches his children to approach things “like a beast.” The phrase suggests wholehearted effort, with rather more energy than the usual parental instruction to do one’s best. Yet the surf-shop thought sits comfortably alongside it. Ambition, in his telling, leaves room for a quite different kind of working day.
Back to the first hire
His newer public LinkedIn profile lists a stealth venture. A recruitment post seeks an operator to help launch its first city, offering equity and direct work with the founding team. The language is eager for somebody comfortable with beginnings: a new hire, a new location, an operation still to be assembled.
It is a fitting place to leave Galil. The public record contains large financing rounds and years of technical development. The newer invitation returns to the immediate task of finding a person who can help make something happen. The circumstances have changed since his early search for a believer. The need for a capable collaborator has endured.
The shovel decision remains revealing. Galil had invested years in a direction, then made room for other builders to carry the technology into places his own company could not reach alone. Changing the business required conviction about the work and flexibility about the plan. For a founder, keeping those two qualities in the same room can be a useful occupation.