Elad Gil

Elad Gil studied mathematics and biology at the University of California, San Diego, before earning a PhD at MIT. His personal website describes a longstanding interest in biology and aging and links to early genetics research in which he participated.⁠[1][2]

In March 1999, research he co-authored as E. B. Gil appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, alongside E. Malone Link and other authors. The study examined the insulin-like developmental pathway in Caenorhabditis elegans and analyzed daf-18, a homolog of the PTEN tumor-suppressor gene. Its experimental subject was the nematode.⁠[3]

Before his entrepreneurial career, Gil worked at McKinseyMcKinsey & CompanyMcKinsey & Company is a management consulting firm headquartered in New York, United States. It was founded in Chicago in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey and, after Marvin Bower established its “professional service” principles, grew into one of the largest pure consulting firms in the world; as of October 2026 it has more than 100 offices in over 50 countries and about 40,000 employees. It has also repeatedly faced regulatory investigations and public criticism over episodes such as its work with Enron, a former leader’s insider trading case, and its consulting for opioid manufacturers.Open the full entry and then GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry. He helped build the mobile business team, served as product manager for mobile Maps and participated in acquisitions including Android.⁠[1]

After leaving Google, he co-founded Mixer Labs and joined Twitter following its acquisition. As vice president of corporate strategy, he worked on location, search, acquisitions and corporate development. Electric Capital's profile describes his involvement during Twitter's growth from approximately 90 to 1,500 employees.⁠[1][4]

Gil co-founded Color and served as CEO from 2013 to December 2016, as recorded in his High Growth Handbook biography. A 2016 company announcement dates the public product launch to April 2015.⁠[1][5]

Color initially offered physician-ordered genetic testing for individuals, covering genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer risk and accompanied by genetic counseling. In April 2016, it announced expansion to more than 100 countries and partnerships in Finland, Israel and Turkey. These descriptions reflect its business announcements at that time.⁠[5]

Stripe Press published Gil's High Growth Handbook in July 2018. In a Y Combinator interview, he recalled initially planning a website before John CollisonJohn CollisonJohn Collison (born 1990) is an Irish entrepreneur who co-founded the online payments company Stripe, where he is president, with his older brother Patrick Collison, Stripe’s chief executive. He grew up in County Tipperary and, while still at secondary school, co-founded Auctomatic with his brother, which was sold for $5 million in 2008; he entered Harvard University in 2009, later left, and in 2010 founded Stripe with Patrick. In March 2017 Forbes named him the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. Since June 2025 he has hosted Stripe’s podcast Cheeky Pint, and in October 2026 he was nominated to Microsoft’s board of directors.Open the full entry saw the draft and encouraged publication as a book.⁠[6]

The book examines how startups grow from roughly a dozen employees into large organizations after achieving product–market fit, including CEO responsibilities, executive hiring, organization design, fundraising and acquisitions. Gil's introduction stresses applying the lessons in context rather than treating them as universal prescriptions.⁠[7][6]

By May 2023, Gil was co-hosting the AI-focused No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo. In a Cognitive Revolution interview, they discussed AI investment opportunities. Gil recalled exposure to machine learning through advertising and mobile products at Google and search at Twitter, followed by early investments in companies including Character.AI, Perplexity and Harvey.⁠[8]

He argued that large technology companies and startups could both benefit from generative AI. His interests included voice, social applications, enterprise software and infrastructure, with opportunities to build around specific workflows, memory and historical context. These were his investment views in 2023.⁠[8]

In September 2023, Ankur Goyal launched the AI-evaluation tool Braintrust, describing Gil's help incubating its early product and team and his co-leading the first round with Alana of Base Case Capital. Goyal also recalled their earlier investment relationship around Impira.⁠[9]

In his July 22, 2025 essay AI Market Clarity, Gil argued that competitive structures were becoming clearer in some AI application markets while highlighting accounting, compliance, sales and security. He proposed that acquiring service businesses and redesigning organizations, processes and collaboration could accelerate adoption more than selling software alone, and disclosed backing two AI-driven acquisitions.⁠[10]

In September, Brain Co. emerged from stealth with a $30 million Series A co-led by Gil Capital and Affinity PartnersAffinity PartnersAffinity Partners is a private investment firm founded in 2021 and wholly owned by Jared Kushner, based in the Miami area of Florida and funded mainly by foreign investors including sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates; its registered investment adviser entity is A Fin Management LLC. As of March 2026 it reported about $6.16 billion in assets under management, and one of its largest publicly known holdings is the Israeli financial group Phoenix Financial. Because its founder also takes part in U.S. government diplomacy in the Middle East, its foreign funding and fee structure have repeatedly been investigated by congressional Democrats; the firm denies any wrongdoing.Open the full entry. Its announcement named Elad Gil, Jared KushnerJared KushnerJared Kushner (Jared Corey Kushner) is an American businessman, investor and political figure, and the founder and chief executive officer of the private investment firm Affinity Partners. He ran his family’s real estate business, Kushner Companies, and bought The New York Observer; from 2017 to 2021 he was a senior adviser in the White House to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, and helped bring about the Abraham Accords. From 2025 he took part in Gaza ceasefire negotiations as an unpaid volunteer, and in February 2026 Trump announced him as an envoy of peace. Potential conflicts of interest between his Gulf sovereign-wealth-fund backing and his diplomatic role have been investigated by congressional Democrats and the media; he and the White House deny them.Open the full entry, Luis Videgaray and Eric Wu as incubation participants. The company develops AI platforms for large organizations, including building permits, industrial and energy work, and healthcare workflows.⁠[11]

On April 8, 2026, Applied Compute announced $80 million in new financing at a $1.3 billion post-money valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins. Elad Gil participated again alongside Lux, GreenoaksGreenoaksGreenoaks is an American investment firm co-founded by Neil Mehta in 2012 and known for concentrated, long-term investing; it made an early, large bet on the Korean e-commerce company Coupang and has invested in companies including Wiz, Stripe, Databricks, and Anthropic. In May 2026, it co-led Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H funding round with Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, and Sequoia Capital.Open the full entry, Neo, Hanabi and others. The company had raised $160 million in total and focused on training and deploying proprietary enterprise AI agents.⁠[12]

As of September 2026, Gil's website described his work as running the multistage investment firm Gil & Co, listing investments including Abridge, AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry, CerebrasCerebrasCerebras Systems is an AI computing company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, known for its Wafer-Scale Engine chips, which turn an entire silicon wafer into a single processor, and for the CS-series systems and inference cloud services built on them. Founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman and four other co-founders, it depended heavily on Abu Dhabi’s G42 for revenue in its early years, shifted from 2025 toward high-speed inference for customers such as OpenAI and AWS, and listed on Nasdaq in May 2026 under the ticker CBRS.Open the full entry, CognitionCognitionCognition is a U.S. artificial intelligence company founded by Scott Wu, Walden Yan and Steven Hao that develops the autonomous AI software engineer Devin. It launched Devin in March 2024, acquired the AI coding tool Windsurf in July 2025, and announced a Series E exceeding $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation in September 2026. Its annualized revenue passed $1 billion that month.Open the full entry, Decagon, Harvey, Mistral, OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, Perplexity and Waymo. Electric Capital also listed him in its advisor network, supporting founders on fundraising, products and organizations.⁠[2][4]

Gil and Sarah Guo interviewed OpenAI president Greg BrockmanGreg BrockmanGreg Brockman is a software engineer and entrepreneur, co-founder and president of OpenAI, and a former chief technology officer of Stripe. His work spans payment infrastructure, engineering organizations and large AI systems, alongside public discussion of AI development and governance.Open the full entry on No Priors. Gil’s questions examined drug-development timelines and validation costs, and potential changes in cybersecurity demand and supply. Brockman’s responses retained the limits imposed by experiments and long-term observation.⁠[13]

X: @eladgil, https://x.com/eladgil (opens in a new window). Personal website: https://eladgil.com/ (opens in a new window); blog: https://blog.eladgil.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14][2]