Gideon Mendels

Gideon Mendels is co-founder and CEO of Comet, a platform for tracking machine learning experiments and evaluating AI models. He started it with Nimrod Lahav, his business partner from an earlier chat-analytics company.

Moving from Software into Machine Learning Research

Mendels started his career as a software engineer and later moved into hands-on model development, beginning as a graduate student at Columbia University, he said on the HumAIn podcast. At Google he built hate speech detection software, and with Lahav he developed the chat analytics app Groupwize, GeekWire reported in 2017.

Looking for a GitHub for Machine Learning

In those roles Mendels saw the same gap: machine learning had no good system for managing projects, the way software had GitHub or sales had Salesforce. He and Lahav built Comet to track code and experiments and let teams learn from past work. "Without this fundamental infrastructure that Comet provides, machine learning teams are inefficient, disorganized, and difficult to manage," he told GeekWire. The company, based in New York City, New York, was then in Seattle, Washington, for the first Alexa Accelerator, run by Amazon with Techstars.