Sharif Shameem
Sharif Shameem is a software developer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco who has founded three AI-related startups: Vectordash, a peer-to-peer GPU cloud that went through Y Combinator in 2019; Debuild, a GPT-3-powered code generation tool whose demos went viral in July 2020; and Lexica, an AI image search engine and generation platform backed by Founders, Inc..15 In January 2026, Shameem joined OpenAI to lead OAI Labs, a research group focused on prototyping new interfaces for human-AI collaboration.7
Early life and education
Shameem studied computer science at the University of Maryland but did not graduate.11 In a 2023 interview, he said the decision to drop out was influenced by a conversation with an investor who had also left college for Y Combinator and later returned, framing the choice as reversible, and by reading Bryan Caplan's book The Case Against Education.2 Before founding his own companies, Shameem worked at MITRE, a federally funded research and development center, where he did computer vision research.2
Vectordash
Shameem's first startup grew out of a trade with a friend who was mining Ethereum on an NVIDIA 1080 Ti around 2016-2017.2 Shameem wanted to train a character-level recurrent neural network on his iMessage history but needed GPU access; renting a T4 on AWS cost $60-80 and was slower than consumer hardware.2 He paid his friend $10 per day for GPU time, a rate that exceeded Ethereum mining revenue, and the arbitrage became the basis for Vectordash: a marketplace connecting cryptocurrency miners' idle GPUs with machine learning researchers.2
The platform launched out of Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, accumulating over 120,000 NVIDIA GPUs and offering rentals at roughly 20 cents per hour.24 Vectordash charged customers $28 per month for cloud gaming, streaming games from GPUs located within approximately 300 miles of the user to keep latency under 20-30 milliseconds.4 Shameem demonstrated Apex Legends running at roughly 100 frames per second on a 13-inch MacBook.4 The company's distributed model predated Google Stadia's launch by about a year.2
Vectordash struggled to convert its initial user base of college students and researchers into paying customers, and larger companies were reluctant to trust a startup with their data.2
Debuild
In July 2020, Shameem gained access to OpenAI's GPT-3 API after tweeting a request for beta access; Greg Brockman, then OpenAI's president, responded the same day.2 Shameem built a tool that accepted natural-language descriptions and generated JSX React components, compiling and rendering them directly in the browser.2 On July 13, 2020, he posted a 30-second demo to Twitter showing a layout generator that converted text descriptions into working UI code.9 The tweet received over 20,000 likes, and Shameem spent the following week releasing additional demos, including generating a functioning React application from a text prompt.2
The project became Debuild, a no-code tool for building web applications by describing their appearance and behavior in plain English.3 Shameem trained the system on code datasets from sources including GitHub and Stack Overflow.3 In a September 2020 interview with Business Insider, he said the company had fewer than five employees and predicted that GPT-3's code-writing capabilities would "increase the number of programmers in the world" rather than replace them.3 WIRED described the tool as offering "a text-to-code tool for building web applications."12
Lexica
Shameem launched Lexica on August 23, 2022, one day after Stability AI open-sourced the Stable Diffusion model weights.2 He had been spending hours in the Stable Diffusion Discord server watching users generate images with complex prompts but found the Discord search bar inadequate for browsing them.2 Over roughly two days, he scraped approximately 10 million images from the Discord, built a search interface using PostgreSQL full-text search, and shipped the site.2
Within 24 hours of launch, Lexica processed 51,000 search queries and served 2.2 terabytes of bandwidth.2 By the second day, those numbers doubled to 111,000 queries and 4.5 terabytes, with 22 million images served.2 The platform reached one million users within approximately ten days, the threshold Shameem had set for treating the project as a full-time company.2
Shameem later added semantic search powered by CLIP embeddings and Facebook's FAISS library for fast nearest-neighbor lookups, enabling users to search by image content rather than prompt text alone.2 The system ran on CPUs for serving, with GPUs used only to compute the embeddings.2
Funding and team
In September 2022, Lexica raised a $5 million seed round led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman through AI Grant.6 Shameem announced the round on September 28, writing that Lexica's goal was "to give everyone the ability to create whatever they imagine."6 Lexica was co-founded by Shameem, Dylan Molina, and Subhash Ramesh, and as of 2026 had a team of four.5
Aperture
In December 2022, Shameem introduced Lexica Aperture, a proprietary text-to-image model developed in-house.10 The first version produced photorealistic images from text prompts, and a second version followed later that month.2 Aperture v3 shipped in April 2023.2 As of May 2023, Lexica was serving over 5 billion images per month.2 The platform is in the Founders, Inc. portfolio.5
OpenAI
On January 5, 2026, Shameem announced on X that he had joined OpenAI, writing: "there are a few rare inflection points throughout history" in which new interaction paradigms for computing are established.7 He described his role as leading OAI Labs, "a research-driven group focused on inventing and prototyping new interfaces for how people collaborate with AI."7 TrendForce reported that Shameem officially joined on January 6, 2026.8