Overview

Cardinal (Cardinal Web, Inc.) was an AI-powered product backlog platform incorporated in January 2023 by Nadav "Wiz" Weizmann and Mor Sela in Austin, Texas. ^[1] The company participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch and built a "system of record for product teams" — software that aggregated customer feedback, CRM data, and task management issues, then used AI to quantify which features represented the most revenue opportunity. ^[2]

Cardinal was a successful exit. Miro acquired the company in May 2024, approximately 18 months after founding — investors saw returns and both founders had life-changing outcomes. The feature Cardinal built — AI-driven product intelligence — found a natural home inside Miro's visual collaboration platform.

Nadav Weizmann joined Miro as VP of Product focused on insights and innovation. ^[3] Cardinal was rebranded as "Miro Insights" and made accessible at insights.miro.com — absorbed into Miro's platform rather than operated as a standalone product. ^[4] The outcome was a win for all parties: a well-executed point solution, built by a credentialed team, acquired by a larger platform that needed the capability.

Founding Story

Nadav Weizmann and Mor Sela had worked together for 15 years before founding Cardinal — an unusually long shared history for a startup founding team. ^[5] Their collaboration spanned multiple institutions and two prior acquisitions, giving both founders direct experience with what it looks like when a startup gets absorbed by a larger platform.

Their résumés read like a deliberate tour of the product intelligence problem. Both served in Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200, the elite signals intelligence unit that has produced a disproportionate share of Israeli tech founders. ^[6] They then worked together at Onavo, the mobile analytics company acquired by Meta in 2013, where they built data infrastructure at scale. After Onavo, they joined Houseparty — the group video chat app — where both Weizmann and Sela led product and engineering. Houseparty was acquired by Epic Games in 2019, and both founders stayed through the integration, spending roughly three years at Epic before departing. ^[7]

Both founders departed Epic Games in November 2022. Sela later shared a LinkedIn post: "Today marks my last day at Epic Games after almost 6 years with the team (3y Houseparty, 3y Epic)." ^[8] Cardinal was incorporated shortly after, with Weizmann's Crunchbase start date recorded as January 6, 2023. ^[9]

The founding insight almost certainly came from lived experience. Both founders had spent years inside product organizations — at consumer scale (Houseparty had tens of millions of users), at enterprise data companies (Docady), and at a gaming giant (Epic) — and had watched product teams struggle to connect customer feedback to prioritization decisions. The standard workflow at most product organizations in 2022-2023 involved manually triaging feedback from Gong call recordings, Salesforce CRM notes, Intercom tickets, and spreadsheets, then making prioritization calls based on gut feel or whoever shouted loudest in a planning meeting. Cardinal's pitch was that AI could automate the aggregation and quantify the revenue signal embedded in that noise.

The team entered Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch with just three employees — effectively the two founders plus one additional hire. ^[10] Cardinal raised a $2.5M pre-seed round from YC and Symbol VC, providing capital and, critically, a network of product leaders who became Cardinal's first customer discovery pool. Weizmann would later credit "hundreds of product and GTM leaders" consulted during the first six months as the foundation for the product's evolution. ^[11]

The founding arc — two experienced operators with a shared 15-year history, a clear problem from personal experience, and immediate access to a large network of potential customers through YC — was about as strong a founding setup as the category allowed.