Luigi Charles is Co-Founder at Thesis (YC F25), an applied AI lab based in San Francisco building autonomous agents to accelerate scientific discovery and AI research.

Luigi holds a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Columbia University and previously served as CTO at Sphere Laboratories, with earlier experience at goPuff, Vanguard, and Franklin Templeton.

A second-time founder with a rare blend of fintech infrastructure and frontier AI ambition, Luigi left a billion-dollar payments company to bet on AI becoming the engine of scientific progress.

Luigi co-founded Sphere in 2022, scaling it to process billions in global cross-border payments annually and achieving a valuation of over $250M at its Series A, backed by Coinbase and Kraken Ventures.

At Thesis, Luigi and his co-founder achieved state-of-the-art results on OpenAI's MLE-Bench in just one month with $10K in compute, outperforming research teams at Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Baidu.