COMET - Key Persons


Doug Blank

Job Titles:
  • Computer Scientist
  • Head of Research
  • Member of the Leadership Team
Doug is a computer scientist, cognitive scientist, ML practitioner, and professor. He has authored many book chapters, articles, and research papers on AI, ML, robotics, and computer science education. He wrote one of the first-ever deep learning systems in Python, called con-x. He is an advocate for open source software and a Distinguished Contributor to the Jupyter Project. He is an Emeritus Professor at Bryn Mawr College, and he has bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Indiana University, Bloomington in Indiana.

Gideon Mendels - CEO, Founder

Job Titles:
  • CEO
  • Co - Founder
  • Computer Scientist
  • Member of the Leadership Team
Gideon is a computer scientist, ML researcher and entrepreneur at his core. Before Comet, Gideon co-founded GroupWize where they trained and deployed NLP models processing billions of chats. His journey with NLP and Speech Recognition models began at Columbia University and Google where he worked on hate speech and deception detection.

Jacques Verré

Job Titles:
  • Member of the Leadership Team
  • Data Scientist
  • Head of Product
Jacques is a data scientist and ML practitioner. He served in data science roles at Triptease, Worldpay, and Brightmile. He founded Stakion, a platform Comet later acquired, which monitored machine learning models in production for breaking changes and concept drift. He holds his master's degree from Imperial College in London, and his engineering degree from CentraleSupélec in île-de-france.

Niko Laskaris

Job Titles:
  • Member of the Leadership Team
  • Researcher
  • VP, Customer Engineering
Niko is a researcher and entrepreneur. Previously, Niko worked as a research scientist at Yale University, studying climate change and complex systems. He also founded and built an educational consulting company based in Vermont, Long Trail Prep. Niko holds a bachelor's degree from Yale University in Connecticut.

Nimrod Lahav - CTO, Founder

Job Titles:
  • Co - Founder
  • Computer Scientist
  • CTO
  • Member of the Leadership Team
  • Software Engineer
Nimrod is a computer scientist and software engineer. He held leadership and engineering roles at Wix, VMware and Amdocs. He later co-founded GroupWize, whose team trained and deployed more than 50 natural language processing (NLP) models in 15 languages to analyze chat messages. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Academic College of Tel Aviv, Yaffo (MTA).

Shir Rinot

Job Titles:
  • Head of Operations
  • Member of the Leadership Team
  • Business Operations Leader
Shir is a business operations leader focused on driving global growth. She served in Unit 8200, Israel's elite military technology unit managing strategic technology projects. She has held technology and management roles in government, law, and industry, serving most recently as director of solutions architecture at Firedome. She holds an LL.B in law and a bachelor's degree in business from Reichman University in Israel and a master of science degree in cybersecurity from Fordham University in New York.

Yuval Nahon

Job Titles:
  • Computer Scientist
  • Head of Engineering
  • Member of the Leadership Team
  • Software Engineer
Yuval is a computer scientist, software engineer, and leader of engineering teams for complex technology. He has held leadership roles at NASA, Cisco, CleverDevices, CosmoCom, Nexite, and Vocaltec. He participated in Harvard Business School's Driving Performance Through Talent Management program. He holds a bachelor's degree in operational research, statistics, and computer science from Tel Aviv University (TAU).