In late 2020, as pandemic lockdowns confined people to their homes, a clandestine app called Vybe Together gained unexpected traction among young New Yorkers. Co-founded by Israeli developer Itamar Gil, Vybe Together connected users with small, invite-only in-person gatherings, offering what many saw as a safe social antidote to isolation. The iOS app went viral on TikTok with the tagline, “Get your rebel on. Get your party on,” amassing thousands on a waitlist overnight.
The spotlight turned harsh in December 2020 when a New York Times reporter’s tweet highlighted Vybe’s promotion of indoor parties. Within hours, Apple removed the app from the App Store for allegedly encouraging “reckless” behavior, and TikTok followed suit by shutting down its account. Gil, then only 22, was thrust into the center of an international media storm. He called Apple’s decision “politically motivated” and appealed, but the ban held.
The controversy became a crucible for Gil. Drawing on his background in the Israel Defense Forces’ elite Mamram programming unit, he rebuilt the app’s foundations. After lockdowns eased, he redesigned Vybe’s backend with stricter content moderation, MongoDB’s geospatial indexing, containerized microservices on AWS, and better safety controls. The rebrand emphasized trust, safety, and community over rebellion. The revamped platform quietly grew to more than 50,000 users in New York City, earning praise for its local discovery features, performance, and scalability. When Vybe was acquired in 2023, Gil closed his first startup chapter with hard-earned lessons in resilience, public scrutiny, and technical execution under pressure.
“Every startup is a pressure cooker,” Gil later said. “Vybe taught me to rebuild under fire, Chillz showed me how to keep remote teams in sync, and PieAssets proved that speed and polish can turn an idea into real money for users in weeks.”
In 2023, Gil joined Chillz, a social event and CRM startup, as Technical Lead. He coordinated a distributed U.S.–Ukraine engineering team, establishing a development rhythm built on clarity and iteration. Using TypeScript and Next.js, he created a dynamic CRM dashboard that visualized user engagement in real time, giving event organizers live insights into audience behavior. He also spearheaded the development of an AI-powered chatbot using TensorFlow’s vector search to answer user queries instantly, integrated with Node.js and Python services. Under his leadership, the company launched its flagship features in record time, highlighting his agile engineering and remote team management skills.
Soon after, Gil joined PieAssets, a real estate fintech startup, as Principal Engineer. Tasked with building a crowdfunding platform from scratch, he combined Next.js for a responsive front-end with Supabase for a scalable backend. Using Tailwind CSS, he crafted a modern, mobile-friendly interface. His server-side rendering optimizations and indexed queries reduced page load times to under two seconds, even for complex multi-filter pages. Within weeks, PieAssets went live, enabling real estate developers to list “flip” projects and investors to buy shares, helping developers raise seed capital efficiently. His end-to-end ownership underscored versatility across product, frontend, backend, and database layers.
By 2024, Gil’s growing reputation for technical excellence and calm under pressure caught the attention of Profound, an AI-driven analytics company. As its first engineer, he transformed the prototype into a production-ready SaaS platform used daily by more than 500 organizations, including major clients like Ramp and Morning Brew. He rewrote critical data ingestion pipelines, improved API response times by 80%, optimized database schemas, and reduced storage costs by 40%. His work directly supported Profound’s later successful funding milestones, a $20 million Series A and a $35 million Series B in 2025.
Later in 2024, Landa, a New York-based fintech startup democratizing real-estate investment, brought Gil on as Director of Product, entrusting him with end-to-end responsibility for engineering and product delivery. He overhauled the architecture toward modular, microservice-based systems, improving scalability, reliability, and release velocity. On the backend, he contributed to property listings, share issuance, secondary-market trading, KYC verification, rent collection, and customer-support flows. On the frontend, he led teams working in React and React Native, ensuring a seamless experience across mobile and web platforms. He also implemented observability stacks using Logz.io, Sentry, and PostHog, revamped CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, and strengthened identity verification and fraud detection.
At 28, Itamar Gil embodies the archetype of a modern full-stack engineer: bridging infrastructure and UI design, leading teams, and executing high-stakes projects. From Vybe’s viral chaos to Chillz’s CRM innovations, PieAssets’ fintech launch, Profound’s AI SaaS scaling, and Landa’s real-estate platform, his career combines technical mastery, rapid execution, and leadership under pressure. Beyond his code, Gil emphasizes mentorship, documentation, transparency, and team culture, often noting, “Good systems outlive good coders, but great teams outlast both.” His trajectory highlights not just engineering skill but also empathy, judgment, and the ability to transform ideas into tangible impact across startups and enterprise platforms.
This article is written in cooperation with Itamar Gil