Overview
Mehdi Ghissassi is highlighted in Omar Mohout's analysis of the Ghent tech ecosystem as a notable investor. His role at DeepMind brings an international AI research perspective to the Ghent investor community.
He holds five master's degrees including computer science and engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. He spent over four years as Head of Product Management at Google DeepMind and a further three years leading AI product incubation there. He invests actively in AI and research-focused companies through the Atomico Angel Investing Program. He co-invested in LegalFly, a Ghent-based legal AI startup, alongside Redalpine. He has since moved to Abu Dhabi as Chief Product and Technology Officer at AI71.
Career history
- AnalystMacquarie Groupinfrastructure and energy
- Product rolesGoogleEmerging Markets, Project Link
- Head of AI Product IncubationGoogle DeepMind
- Head of Product ManagementGoogle DeepMind
- Chief Product and Technology OfficerAI71Abu Dhabi
Investments
LegalFly
LegalFly is a Ghent-based AI workspace for in-house legal and compliance teams, founded in 2023 by four ex-Tinder product executives, with EUR 17M raised and 800% revenue growth in 2025.
In the news
- my awesome friend Bilal Abu-Ghazaleh left Scale AI about a year ago to start 1001 AI. In nine months he raised $39M from tier 1 US VCs, with Lux Capital and General Catalyst leading, and Chris Re of Stanford University among the angels (including yours truly). The mission: put frontier intelligence behind every decision in the physical economy. Every lab is racing on benchmarks. Making frontier models work inside a port, an airline or a grid, where the data is live, the constraints are physical and every decision has a price, is
- join us!
- Can Europe and the Middle East build their own AI stack? Wrong question, as I argued on stage at HumanX Amsterdam alongside Fabrizio Del Maffeo of Axelera AI. A better question is: which layers do you own, and which do you deliberately depend on others for? Nobody in either region will own the whole stack. Europe has ASML which occupies a unique place in the stack, 440 million educated adopters and deep domain expertise in various industries — but it's a net energy importer with limited frontier compute (though there are
- Reporter’s Notebook: Europe’s Sovereign AI Push Needs Customers As Well As CapitalCrunchbase News Research Lead Gené Teare moderated panels and spoke with leaders building Europe and the Middle East’s AI ecosystems at HumanX in Amsterdam. Here we share a snippet of her conversation with Axelera AI CEO Fabrizio Del Maffeo and AI71 CPTO Mehdi Ghissassi.
Crunchbase News · 2 Oct 2026
- My father kept his handwritten notes from a 1998 Davos session on China. I spoke at the same forum 28 years later — and his notes had already written my takeaway. One line, in his handwriting, from Vice-Premier Li Lanqing (roughly translated): "everyone can share the same rules, but history and identity make true uniformity impossible. Nature is like that." A country can join the same system as everyone else and still remain entirely itself. Twenty-eight years on, at #AMNC26 Summer Davos, in China, I sat on a panel about the
- The model that won was ten times smaller than the one that topped the leaderboard 🤯 A legal client needed Arabic speech-to-text. We reached for the state-of-the-art model at the top of the public Arabic benchmark. It lost. The real task was long strings of digits spoken in dialect — something no public benchmark had ever measured. So the team built an evaluation from the actual work, scored on whether every digit came out right. A model ten times smaller won. That gap — between the average case a benchmark measures and the
- congrats Causa Prima team for the launch 🚀 Most B2B finance tools serve only one side of a transaction and break the moment something has to be settled between buyer and supplier — a single disputed invoice can spiral into weeks of emails. Causa Prima puts both sides on one network, where AI agents resolve disputes and payment terms in seconds. The team was behind Taulia (acquired by SAP) and Finoa, who built the rails nearly every supplier in the world already uses to get paid. Their vision: make fixed payment terms obsolete, so
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