Founder & CEO
In 2006 Alexander proved, with Tom Banks, that a finite system of fluctuating elements can encode the geometry of an entire spacetime, particles and black holes included. Susskind later cited the paper as seminal. He was a theoretical physicist at the time, a PhD in string theory at UC Santa Cruz and then a professor of quantum gravity and particle phenomenology at USC in Spain, and he thought he was doing cosmology.
He left academia for industry and spent the better part of two decades building AI companies across adtech, cybersecurity, finance, and biotech, with five acquisitions along the way: Beats Music to Apple, Quid to NetBase, Boomtrain to ZetaGlobal, Idle Games to GSN Games, and his own company TensorML to Pythian Group, where he built their machine learning practice. At Graphistry he led graph data science and built Louie.ai, a generative AI analyst that could interrogate datasets in natural language.
In 2025 he founded Therml, having realized that the mathematics of the universe he studied and the mathematics of the AI systems he built were the same mathematics at different energy scales. He spoke on inference architecture at DCD Connect NYC in March 2026 alongside Cerebras, Positron AI, and Ampere.
Between the physics and the startups he sailed across Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, toured southern India by Royal Enfield after an unplanned stint marooned in the Andamans, and trekked across Europe working odd jobs, selling telephones, picking apples, cooking. Proud father of a beautiful daughter.
Therml is building processors that use thermodynamic physics for computation — performing both training and inference on a single substrate. Founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco.
We are a small team with outsized ambition: physicists who understand the math, engineers who can build the silicon, and researchers who have spent years at the frontier.