About Gimlet

The people
behind Gimlet.

We are a fast-moving team with expertise in AI research, production-grade systems, and building successful startups.

We work together in San Francisco.

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Leadership Advisors & investors Board

Leadership

Zain Asgar

Co-Founder/CEO, Stanford Faculty

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Zain Asgar

Co-Founder/CEO, Stanford Faculty

Zain is the co-founder and CEO of Gimet Labs and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He previously co-founded Pixie Labs as CEO, later serving as GM/GVP of Pixie & Open Source at New Relic following Pixie's acquisition. His background also includes serving as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark, building large-scale data and AI/ML systems at Google AI, Trifacta, and NVIDIA. He has a PhD from Stanford University.

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Michelle Nguyen

Co-Founder, Head of Engineering

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Michelle Nguyen

Co-Founder, Head of Engineering

Michelle Nguyen is a co-founder of Gimlet Labs, where she leads engineering and helps build the next generation of AI inference infrastructure. Previously, she was the first engineer at Pixie Labs, where she worked across the stack on projects ranging from deployment infrastructure to its distributed query engine. Before Pixie, she was a software engineer at Trifacta, building intuitive and interactive interfaces for processing data. Michelle holds both a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley.

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Omid Azizi

Co-Founder, Head of Hardware Platforms

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Omid Azizi

Co-Founder, Head of Hardware Platforms

Omid Azizi is a co-founder and Head of Hardware Platforms at Gimlet Labs, focused on disaggregated inference across current and emerging hardware. He was previously a founding engineer at Pixie Labs (acquired by New Relic), where he later led Kubernetes observability, and at Hicamp Systems (acquired by Intel), where he went on to work on server CPUs and AI training chips. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.

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Natalie Serrino

Co-Founder, KForge

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Natalie Serrino

Co-Founder, KForge

Natalie Serrino is a co-founder of Gimlet Labs, where she leads kforge, Gimlet's kernel generation system for diverse accelerators. She writes and speaks regularly on kernel generation and heterogeneous inference, including at AI Engineer, KubeCon, and other conferences. Previously she was a visiting scholar at Stanford, an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark, and a founding engineer at Pixie Labs, continuing as a principal engineer at New Relic after its acquisition.

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James Bartlett

Co-Founder, System Architect

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

James Bartlett

Co-Founder, System Architect

James Bartlett is a co-founder of Gimlet, defining system architecture across software and data center infrastructure. Previously, he was a founding engineer at Pixie Labs, where he helped build the core software platform before the company’s acquisition. Before that, he developed early audio AI models for hearing aids at Whisper while studying EECS and Mathematics at UC Berkeley.

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Beltir Caglar-Dayanik

Head of BD & Partnerships

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Beltir Caglar-Dayanik

Head of BD & Partnerships

Beltir leads business development and partnerships at Gimlet. She previously spent more than four years at Intel across several roles, most recently serving as Vice President, Strategic AI Initiatives and Partnerships. Before Intel, she was an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company, focused on semiconductors, networking and technology infrastructure.

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Dan Haarmann

Head of Finance

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Dan Haarmann

Head of Finance

Dan Haarmann has more than 25 years of experience building and scaling technology companies. As the Head of Finance for Gimlet Labs, he is focused on establishing the Finance function and raising capital for the Company's next stage of growth. He began his career at PwC before joining eBay during its hypergrowth years. He's held several CFO and COO positions at venture-backed startups including AiFi, FuelX and Ongo. At HP, he helped run the company's global ecommerce platform and digital transformation efforts. Dan went on to serve as an investor and operating partner at Translink Capital and then built a fractional CFO and Ops practice where he worked with Gimlet and other world-class start ups on capital formation, operations, and board relations. Dan holds an MBA and an MSA from Northeastern University and a BA from Colgate University.

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Trent Farrell

Head of DC Procurement

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Trent Farrell

Head of DC Procurement

Trent Farrell leads infrastructure strategy at Gimlet Labs, overseeing datacenter sourcing, diligence, and commercial partnerships. He works across site selection, facility design, and contract negotiations to secure the power and capacity needed for AI deployments. Prior to Gimlet, Trent expanded Groq’s global inference infrastructure, negotiating nine datacenter deployments across six countries in nine months. His earlier experience spans infrastructure sourcing and low-latency network development for PlayStation, Facebook and Riot Games.

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John Mangiante

Head of DC Ops

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

John Mangiante

Head of DC Ops

John Mangiante is the Head of Data Center Operations at Gimlet Labs leading global infrastructure strategy. With 20+ years at Google, Microsoft, and Groq, John now operates the physical foundation behind Gimlet's heterogeneous architecture, integrating GPUs, CPUs, and purpose-built accelerators from partners like NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Arm, Cerebras, and d-Matrix into unified production environments. His focus is on bridging the real-world gap between homogeneous data center design, built around standardized servers, networking, power, and cooling, and the heterogeneous reality of modern AI, where different silicon demands different operating conditions. The result is resilient, safety-driven operations that deliver more intelligence per watt and meet the performance, efficiency, and scale that agentic AI workloads require.

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Elliot Hayes

Head of Talent

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Elliot Hayes

Head of Talent

Elliot Hayes leads Talent Acquisition at Gimlet Labs, marking his fifth time serving as a founding recruiter. With over 15 years of experience, he has partnered with founders and engineering leaders to build high-performing teams and scale technology companies from their earliest stages through hypergrowth. Prior to Gimlet, Elliot led hardware and software engineering recruiting at Groq and held recruiting leadership roles at Zendesk, Cruise, Otter.ai, and Goodreads. He holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley, where he was a national champion rower.

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Jinelle Yien

Head of Legal

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Jinelle Yien

Head of Legal

Jinelle Yien is Head of Legal at Gimlet Labs. She is an experienced legal executive and strategic business advisor with expertise in artificial intelligence, semiconductor technologies, advanced computing, data center infrastructure and real estate, intellectual property, and corporate finance. Her career spans Intel Corporation, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, Sidley Austin LLP, and the New York City Law Department. She has advised on multibillion-dollar transactions and worked with Fortune 50 companies, multinational corporations, government institutions, and businesses of all sizes across North America, Europe, and Asia. Jinelle graduated from Columbia University in New York City with a Bachelor of Arts in History and earned a Juris Doctor and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She has served on various boards and is actively engaged in initiatives focused on education, children, and governance.

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Fred Kjolstad

Chief Scientist

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Fred Kjolstad

Chief Scientist

Fred Kjolstad is the Chief Scientist at Gimlet Labs, where he helps formulate the research agenda and guide the scientific direction. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford, where he researches compilers, programming models, and architecture. He got his PhD from MIT where he wrote a dissertation on sparse tensor algebra compilation that won the MIT EECS Sprowls PhD Thesis Award in Computer Science.

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Jon Tait

Head of Strategic Hardware Partnerships

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Jon Tait

Head of Strategic Hardware Partnerships

Jon Tait leads Strategic Hardware Partnerships at Gimlet Labs, working with leading semiconductor, systems, and infrastructure partners to advance the company's heterogeneous AI inference platform. He brings extensive experience building businesses, developing strategic partnerships, and scaling complex global operations. Prior to Gimlet, Jon held leadership roles at NVIDIA, Groq, and Apple. At Groq, he helped expand the company's global AI infrastructure footprint, developing strategic commercial partnerships and executing large-scale deployments across North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

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Gaetan Castelein

Head of Marketing

Gimlet Labs / Leadership

Gaetan Castelein

Head of Marketing

Gaetan Castelein is head of Marketing at Gimlet Labs. Prior to Gimlet, he built and led GTM teams for leading enterprise startups including Confluent, Tecton, Cohesity, and Onehouse. Gaetan also led Product Management and Marketing for the storage business of VMware, and was a strategy consultant in the technology practice of The Boston Consulting Group. Gaetan holds an MBA from Stanford University GSB, and a BSEE from UCL in Belgium.

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