Exclusive: Altman And Masa Back a 27-Year-Old's Plan to Build a New Bell Labs Ultra

Episteme and Louis Andre would like to fix science

There’s very little about Louis Andre on the internet, which will stand out as strange in a few paragraphs’ time.

I can tell you that he’s 27 years old and grew up in Europe. He has a French mother and a father who hails from Madagascar. Andre began studying neuroscience and computer science at University College London before embarking on a scientific odyssey, hopping to labs at Princeton and Stanford and a Parkinson’s disease-related biotech startup backed by Sergey Brin.

Those who know Andre say he’s smart and well-liked and that he did good research. None of his projects, though, were obvious blockbusters. For the most part, Andre has shuffled about behind the scenes, living off research grants and brief stints at small companies.

As of Monday, however, Andre will find himself at the center of much attention. He’s revealing a new company called Episteme that’s backed by Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son and a host of other (as of yet) undisclosed investors, as Core Memory can report exclusively. Based in San Francisco, Episteme is an effort to create a modern-day Bell Labs or Xerox PARC in that it hopes to attract the world’s top scientists and have them work on a wide range of potential breakthrough products.

“We want to step in and be able to support individuals who are really thoughtful and want to work on meaningful ideas but feel stuck or don’t see a future in existing systems,” said Andre, who is the CEO of Episteme. “There are a lot of brilliant people who are disillusioned by the current way of doing science.”