This paper proposes a new approach to the notion of telicity, enriching the denotation of an uninflected telic predicate (e.g., 'build a house') with a modal mereological structure inspired by teleological modality. On this account, eventualities in the denotation of a telic predicate are unified not by denoting exclusively culminated eventualities, but instead by their relationship to a culmination condition (construed broadly as a télos; cf. Kratzer 2004), which specifies what would have to obtain for a qualifying eventuality to culminate, and thus how an eventuality can make progress towards culmination (Bach 1986, Parsons 1990, Szabó 2004). This account affords a unified analysis of non-culminating interpretations of telic predicates across languages, accounting both for imperfective paradox effects (Dowty 1979, a.o.), as well as for the existence of non-culminating perfectives of accomplishments (in languages like Hindi; Singh 1998, Arunachalam & Kothari 2011, Altshuler 2014) with an extensional treatment of grammatical aspects. In addition, by proposing a formal relationship between the structure of telic predicates and teleological modals, the account links telic culmination entailments to the actuality entailments of perfectively-marked ability modals (Bhatt 1999, Mari 2016, Nadathur 2020).