Mickey Kertesz was on a paragliding trip in Australia when a book began interfering with his career plans. He was reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species, surrounded by the sort of scenery that gives the argument useful supporting evidence. He remembered looking up from the pages and seeing the world differently. Biology had become difficult to leave alone.
At the time, he worked in technology. He had grown up in Israel, served as a pilot in the Israeli Air Force, and studied computer science. The move into biology came later. His account of that Australian trip has the appeal of an origin story without the usual business accessories. No pitch deck appears. The immediate product is a change in attention.
“My passion is being at the place where new things are happening,” he said in 2013. That preference would survive several changes of employer and job title. Moleculo, Illumina, Karius, and now Dinamo Biotechnologies mark different stages of the same working life: learn something, help make it usable, then find another beginning.
A career is usually tidied up after the fact. The degrees acquire an orderly progression. The companies line up beneath them. Curiosity looks wonderfully punctual on a résumé. Kertesz’s story is more interesting when the detours stay visible. Someone already working in one technical field decided that another deserved years of study. The change required a commitment long before it offered a commercial outcome.
The computer scientist goes back to school
His academic route crossed Tel Aviv University, where he earned a master’s in computer science, the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he completed a doctorate in computational biology, and Stanford, where he did postdoctoral work in bioengineering. These are different forms of training, with different questions and different tools. Together, they explain why his later work could straddle laboratory experiments and computation.
Postdoctoral work is a research appointment rather than another degree. The distinction matters here because Kertesz’s time at Stanford placed him among collaborators whose work would become part of his business life. Stephen Quake’s laboratory appears repeatedly in that history. Scientific relationships, as much as institutional names, connect the chapters.
Moving between fields offers a useful way to reconsider a problem. A computer scientist may ask how information is represented, processed, or recovered. A laboratory researcher must also ask what a physical process actually produces. The two sets of questions meet in sequencing. More data can be valuable; data arranged so that someone can understand them can be more valuable still.
That is the territory Kertesz entered. His background gave him a vocabulary for algorithms as well as an education in biology. It also made the familiar division between the scientific founder and the business founder rather awkward. Here was a researcher who would go on to run companies. The titles changed, but the technical questions remained close at hand.
A small company inside a much larger machine
At Stanford, Kertesz and Dmitry Pushkarev worked on different research problems that shared a sequencing obstacle. They joined forces on technology that combined laboratory methods with software. Stephen Quake became a scientific co-founder of Moleculo. Tim Blauwkamp joined the early team and led its molecular biology work.
The company’s name came from a Conan O’Brien Saturday Night Live sketch. Pushkarev shared the joke; Kertesz checked the domain; the name was registered. A very serious technical enterprise acquired a name with rather less institutional dignity than its founders’ degrees. It is a pleasing reminder that a company can begin with both a research problem and a laugh.
Moleculo’s early operations were spare. Kertesz recalled secondhand equipment, shared resources at the QB3 incubator at UCSF, and paying customers. “I was the marketing, sales, support, etc.” is his compact description of the executive job. The abbreviation does considerable work. A small company is an excellent place to discover how many departments can fit into one person.
Consider the ordinary work hidden inside that list. Someone must explain the product. Someone must hear what the customer needs. Someone must answer after the purchase. In an established company these activities have separate budgets and managers. In a young one, their proximity can be useful. The person making the promise is close enough to hear whether it was kept.
“I don’t want to over-promise.”Mickey Kertesz, discussing sequencing performance, 2013
Build on what already exists
Moleculo drew attention from investors partly because it built on an existing platform. True Ventures invested in 2012. The founders combined DNA tagging and algorithms with Illumina hardware, giving the firm a way to approach a market outside its previous experience. The attraction was a focused technical opportunity rather than a proposal to construct an entire industry from scratch.
In True’s later account, the founders’ expertise across disciplines, introductions through trusted contacts, and ambition all mattered. So did the business design: software and automation, early sales to individual customers, and a product developed around equipment with an existing user base. That account makes the investment intelligible without pretending that the science was simple.
An installed platform brings constraints, but it also brings people who already use it. For a founder, that changes the starting question. Instead of persuading everyone to adopt an unfamiliar machine, a company can improve what people already do. The customer has a workflow, a budget, and a problem. The new business has a place to begin.
Kertesz later introduced True to founders behind its next two investments in the field. His place in that network extended beyond his own company. An introduction is a modest unit of influence, easy to overlook beside a financing announcement. Yet it is one way technical communities grow: someone who has crossed a boundary helps the next person cross it.
The exit that kept the work going
Illumina acquired Moleculo in late 2012 and announced the deal in January 2013. The acquisition joined a young sequencing business to a company whose instruments already formed part of its commercial setting. The buyer and the product had a practical relationship before the transaction gave them a corporate one.
DigitalDx’s account describes a product and service business with cloud-based data storage, built in roughly thirteen months. Illumina subsequently commercialized the technology as the TruSeq Synthetic Long-Read DNA Library Prep kit. The result gives the company’s short independent existence a tangible afterlife: a research approach became something other researchers could obtain and use.
The temptation with a quick acquisition is to treat elapsed time as the whole achievement. Thirteen months is a striking number. It also leaves out the education, the research setting, and the relationships that preceded incorporation. A startup’s birthday measures the age of a legal entity. It cannot measure how long its founders have been learning to solve its problem.
There is another distinction worth keeping in view. Selling a company and abandoning a scientific idea are separate decisions. An acquisition can change who handles distribution, manufacturing, and customer access while allowing development to continue. For a technical founder, the interesting question is what happens to the work once it reaches an organization capable of carrying it further.
A short company history with a longer product life.
Karius changes the scale
Kertesz co-founded Karius in 2014. Tim Blauwkamp and Stephen Quake again appear in its founding history. The recurrence of collaborators gives this chapter continuity with Moleculo, even as the business itself took a different path. Kertesz served as CEO through the company’s early development and commercialization.
In February 2020, Karius announced a $165 million Series B financing led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. General Catalyst and HBM participated alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The size of that round belongs to the company’s financing history. It is a measure of capital committed to the business, rather than a figure for its founder’s personal wealth.
A funding round also changes the nature of the job. The early founder’s question is often whether a product and a company can be made to work at all. With more capital come decisions about where to expand, whom to hire, and which capabilities to develop internally. The spreadsheet grows. So does the number of people whose work depends on its assumptions.
In October 2020, Alec Ford became Karius’s CEO. Kertesz moved to president and chief product officer. The announcement assigned Ford the next phase of growth and placed Kertesz closer to the company’s product vision. Founding a company gives someone a permanent place in its history; it does not make every later executive role identical.
That transition is part of the story, not a footnote beneath the financing number. Company building includes choosing who does what as the organization changes. The founding team’s work has to live inside a structure that can continue developing. Sometimes the founder stays in the same seat. Sometimes the work calls for a different arrangement.
Another beginning, with Dinamo
Kertesz’s current chapter is Dinamo Biotechnologies. A March 2026 public document identifies him as its CEO, and his founder profile includes Dinamo among the companies he has started. Greenfield Partners’ portfolio also lists the business with his name and a 2026 investment entry.
His LinkedIn activity has included sharing Dinamo’s recruitment notice for roles in business development, research and development, data science, and bioinformatics. That list brings together commercial and technical work. It is a small public glimpse of the responsibilities involved in assembling another company.
The original Australian episode still offers a useful way into this career. Reading changed the questions he wanted to spend his time answering. Formal study followed. Collaborators followed. Companies followed. The sequence has room for both deliberate preparation and the unexpected interest that makes preparation feel necessary.
He has already been a researcher, a chief executive, and a product leader. Those experiences do not turn the next beginning into a settled outcome. They give it a history. For Kertesz, starting again means returning to the practical business of bringing people, ideas, and tools together, with another company to build and more work ahead.