How Gil Peleg Is Winning VC Backing for Mainframe AI

This article features Gil Peleg, one of the top four 2026 Influential Mainframers.

While others try to modernize around the mainframe, Gil Peleg is building AI inside it. VCs are paying attention. 

Recently named a Top Influencer in the 2026 class of Influential Mainframers, Peleg sits in the top 15% of nominees worldwide. Here’s how he’s changing the narrative for the platform, winning over skeptical venture capitalists, and building “Mainframe-Aware AI” as the next great innovation.

In the high-stakes world of enterprise technology, Gil Peleg’s rise might seem sudden, but it is actually the culmination of 27 years spent deep within the mainframe ecosystem. From his early days in storage development at IBM to founding Model9 (acquired by BMC), Peleg has made a career out of bridging the gap between “legacy” systems and the cutting edge.

Why Gil Peleg Built Geniez AI for the Mainframe

Peleg’s unique perspective comes from his background in storage and data architecture. He views the mainframe not as a legacy silo, but as every company’s most valuable “treasure trove” for AI.

This data-first philosophy is what led him to start Geniez AI. Seeing people use ChatGPT in their private lives to parse information, Peleg recognized a massive gap in bringing that same power to the professional mainframe world. 

But between the problem and the solution is a significant hurdle: funding.

The VC Gauntlet: Leading with the Numbers

For many outside the industry, the mainframe carries an old-fashioned reputation. However, when Peleg talks to Venture Capitalists (VCs), he doesn’t lead with the past; he leads with the staggering reality of the present.

“I lead with the numbers,” Peleg explains. “[Mainframes manage] trillions of transactions a day. The world’s largest banks, airlines, and insurers are running on Z. Everyone knows these enterprises are in a race to leverage generative AI. Then I ask the VCs: “Who is building AI for those enterprises?””

By identifying a massive market with a real pain point and almost zero competition, Peleg successfully translated the mainframe story into a high-yield, high-growth opportunity that modern VCs are eager to back. 

While Peleg makes the transition from “legacy” to “innovation” sound seamless, his success in securing investment for Geniez AI places him in a rarified group of entrepreneurs.

Securing investment for a mainframe startup is a notorious challenge. According to the Crunchbase Q1 2026 Report, institutional VCs typically fund only about 1% of the pitches they see. Of that, roughly 80% of total global venture funding is flowing specifically into AI.

The “Mainframe-Aware” Edge

While generalist AI tools are making waves in coding, Peleg argues they lack the specialized “contextual intelligence” required for true mainframe excellence. This led to the birth of Geniez AI, a solution that is more than a smart autocomplete.

While others try to modernize the mainframe “from the outside,” Peleg’s team leverages internal expertise to build a product that runs directly on the platform. Read that again: Directly on the platform.

Because many modern Python AI packages aren’t available on the mainframe, Geniez AI acts as a bridge, enabling the latest AI advancements to be applied to mainframe data immediately. 

Peleg wants to be clear: There is no model training involved, and no data replication in the background. In an interview with Planet Mainframe, he shared an example of how Geniez AI works.

Geniez AI Example
Let’s say you want to find out why your CICS is slow. If you want to understand that through a natural-language chat interface, ask your Operations Genie. You can start with something as generic as “Why is the system slow?” or go as technical as “Show me the locking status on my DB2 query.”

The Operations Genie goes to the mainframe, extracts the CICS information, the DB2 details, relevant SMF records, checks performance, and analyzes behavior. Then, the Operations Genie combines that information with system metric and syslog messages and composes a response tailored to your true environment – in minutes. You can’t train a model to do that because that’s real-time occurrences in your live system.

Winning the AI Security Battle

It’s impressive technology, but security is a frequent hurdle for AI adoption. To win over the world’s most sensitive organizations, Geniez AI uses a patented architecture that runs on the end-user’s own RACF ID with zero elevated privileges (i.e. no APF-authorization and no UID(0) requirements).

“We didn’t ask customers to trust us,” Peleg says. “We asked them to trust decades of proven mainframe security controls.” This approach turned the AI security conversation into a genuine competitive advantage.

The Silence of Success

Geniez AI boasts impressive stats, including that it can save developers an average of one hour per day. However, Peleg finds the most meaning in the “lightbulb moments” that occur during customer implementations.

He recalls a senior architect at a major financial institution who was deeply skeptical. The architect gave the Operations Genie a complex performance issue he had been investigating for days as a “stress test.”

“When it came back with a precise, contextually accurate diagnosis drawn from real system data, the senior architect went quiet for a moment,” Peleg shares. “He then said, ‘This would have saved me days.’ 

“That silence was worth more than any metric. It told me we had crossed the threshold from an exciting technology to a genuinely indispensable product.”

According to Peleg, early adopters are already proving ROI through hours saved, faster onboarding, and fewer escalations requiring intervention.

The Vision: An Inevitable Convergence

Looking toward the future, Peleg sees the relationship between AI and the mainframe as one of inevitable convergence. While the AI market moves at lightning speed, his mission remains clear: leading broader organizational adoption at pace.

His advice for those who are nervous? Start with education.

“Keep an open mind and educate yourself on generative AI,” he encourages. “Once people learn about the security controls and how AI connects to the mainframe, they are more willing to give it a shot”.

With Gil Peleg leading the charge, the magic of Geniez AI may become a foundational part of the mainframe’s future.

You can connect with Gil on LinkedIn.

Follow @PlanetMainframe and #PMFInfluentialMainframers to congratulate this year’s honorees.