In this episode
Thesis
Co-founder
Pivoted in October 2026
Now building
Co-Founder & CTO
Robots that assemble and maintain the machines civilization runs on.
Thesis is building a system that runs its own machine learning experiments and uses the outcome of each one to choose the next, aimed first at researchers in areas like medical imaging, climate, materials and robotics, and in the long run at every domain of science.[1]Launch YCThesis: Building the frontier of AI discoveryYC, Nov 11, 2025[2]Deeptech DecodedSergio Charles on experiment throughput and choosing the next experiment (20:39)Episode[3]Deeptech DecodedSergio Charles on domains from medical imaging to new materials (26:54)Episode Luigi is a second-time founder.[4]Deeptech DecodedLuigi Charles on his second startup after a stablecoin payments company (01:15)Episode Previously, he co-founded Sphere, a cross-border payments company built on stablecoins that processes billions of dollars a year and was valued at more than $250M in its Series A.[1]Launch YCThesis: Building the frontier of AI discoveryYC, Nov 11, 2025[4]Deeptech DecodedLuigi Charles on his second startup after a stablecoin payments company (01:15)Episode[5]FortuneCross-border crypto payments company Sphere raises $5 million in funding round led by Coinbase and KrakenPress, Dec 11, 2024 He has a background in infrastructure and production engineering. He studied mathematics and computer science at Columbia. Thesis (YC F25) is state of the art on OpenAI's MLE-Bench, reached in one month on $10k of compute, ahead of research teams at Microsoft, Google, Meta and Baidu.[1]Launch YCThesis: Building the frontier of AI discoveryYC, Nov 11, 2025
Decoded before it's obvious.
Luigi Charles is a co-founder of Thesis, an applied AI lab accelerating the frontier of AI discovery.[1]Launch YCThesis: Building the frontier of AI discoveryYC, Nov 11, 2025[4]Deeptech DecodedLuigi Charles on his second startup after a stablecoin payments company (01:15)Episode He previously built Sphere, a cross-border payments company that processes billions of dollars a year and was valued at more than $250M in its Series A.[1]Launch YCThesis: Building the frontier of AI discoveryYC, Nov 11, 2025
A Y Combinator F25 company building a system that uses the outcome of each machine learning experiment to optimize the next.[2]Deeptech DecodedSergio Charles on experiment throughput and choosing the next experiment (20:39)Episode[6]Deeptech DecodedSergio Charles on scoring experiments before training them (44:31)Episode
It is state of the art on OpenAI's MLE-Bench, the benchmark for how well AI systems train machine learning models autonomously.[1]Launch YCThesis: Building the frontier of AI discoveryYC, Nov 11, 2025[7]Deeptech DecodedLuigi Charles on MLE-Bench and Kaggle competitions (34:09)Episode Thesis reached that in one month with $10k of compute, ahead of research teams at Microsoft, Google, Meta and Baidu.[1]Launch YCThesis: Building the frontier of AI discoveryYC, Nov 11, 2025
He co-founded Sphere, a cross-border payments company built on stablecoins that processes billions of dollars a year.[1]Launch YCThesis: Building the frontier of AI discoveryYC, Nov 11, 2025[4]Deeptech DecodedLuigi Charles on his second startup after a stablecoin payments company (01:15)Episode[5]FortuneCross-border crypto payments company Sphere raises $5 million in funding round led by Coinbase and KrakenPress, Dec 11, 2024
At researchers in fields such as medical imaging, climate, materials and robotics, and in the long run at every domain of science, from computational biology to mathematics and physics.[3]Deeptech DecodedSergio Charles on domains from medical imaging to new materials (26:54)Episode[1]Launch YCThesis: Building the frontier of AI discoveryYC, Nov 11, 2025 The stated ambition is a machine that discovers the next Transformer or the next AlphaFold rather than a tool that assists with one experiment at a time.[1]Launch YCThesis: Building the frontier of AI discoveryYC, Nov 11, 2025
Last updated Oct 23, 2026
