Dor Kalev

Engineering leader, serial founder, and writer. Building at the intersection of technology and people.

Two decades building things that scale

  • Cut my teeth on large-scale engineering at Seeking Alpha.
  • As CTO of FTBpro / 90min, scaled the world's largest fan-generated football media platform to 130M pageviews/month—growing 20x without spending an extra penny on infrastructure.
  • Co-founded Contextors, an NLP startup—built a novel sentence parser, entity recognition, question-answering, and sentiment analysis APIs.
  • Founded Kapai and a.tax, drawn each time to simplifying the complex.
  • Created HaDaf (daff.co.il), a digital stage for independent Hebrew writing—342 authors, 3,000+ works.
  • Led engineering at Labguru, a platform helping scientists manage their research.
  • Now at BoltX, a Physical AI company building intelligent co-pilots for industrial maintenance teams.
  • Writer—165+ pieces in Hebrew poetry and prose, the Blindman series on Medium, and daily commentary on democracy and human rights.

The journey so far

  • 2025 – Present
    Engineering
    Physical AI company powering a new age of machine experts. Tackling the skilled-labor crisis in industrial maintenance.
  • 2025
    Co-Founder & CTO
    a.tax
    Tax management platform.
  • 2023 – 2025
    VP Engineering
    Led engineering for a lab management platform used by scientists worldwide.
  • 2018 – 2023
    Self-Employed
    21tech
  • 2017
    Co-Founder & CTO
    Kapai (kap.ai)
  • 2014 – 2017
    Co-Founder & CTO
    Contextors
    Natural language processing startup. Built novel sentence parsing and NLP APIs.
  • 2012 – 2014
    CTO
    Scaled the world's largest fan-generated football media platform to 130M pageviews/month.
  • 2007 – 2011
    Deputy VP R&D

Selected pieces

  • Daily on Facebook—democracy and human rights in Israel.
  • 165 poems and stories in Hebrew on HaDaf.
  • English essays and the Blindman series on Medium.

Talks

The Dark Side of Single-Page Applications
Rails Israel, 2013 · Lessons from migrating FTBpro to Backbone