Gabriel Chaouat

Based in New YorkColumbia University · Class of 2029

I’m Gabriel, a Columbia student and the co-founder of Specht Labs.

I grew up in Paris and live in New York. I spend most of my time working on Specht Labs, and I love composing music, drawing and meeting new people.

Explore my work ↓

Entrepreneurship & experience

01CURRENT / CO-FOUNDER & COO

Specht Labs

We are building foundational AI to revolutionize computation by discovering, composing and improving algorithms.August 2026 — present

I met Sanay at the gym when I started at Columbia, and we quickly became very close. Davi and I became friends because we both speak French. Then Davi met Sanay, and the three of us became very close friends. This summer, we started Specht Labs together in San Diego.

spechtlabs.ai

02ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Building companies

Origin Posters, SC, PaperFlow, and Specht Labs.From age 15 to today

Specht Labs is my fourth (and hopefully last) startup. At 15, I co-founded Origin Posters, where I designed posters and tried selling them on Shopify. We reached 100k clicks. Then, my second startup SC aimed to detect patterns from successful college applications and use them to optimize our clients’ applications. My third startup, PaperFlow, synthesized very large research papers. It was used by Ivy League professors and got backed by a Palo Alto VC. I had to stop it because it didn’t get revenue after months. Each of these experiences taught me to be creative when facing problems.

03OTHER WORK EXPERIENCE

Finance, investing & research

Venture capital, private equity, infrastructure advisory, and macroeconomics research.2023 — 2026

My finance experience began in Paris and has continued alongside school and building companies. At Astris Finance, I also developed an AI workflow for recurring research and document-processing tasks.

Outside internships, I research public companies and invest personal capital. I’m interested in how businesses work, their competitive positions, and how technology changes them.

Astris Finance · Investment banking · Summer 2026. Infrastructure and energy-transition advisory, market research, financial analysis, and client materials.
Ardian · Private equity · July 2024. Expansion and Infrastructure teams, financial assumptions, revenue projections, and investment discussions.
Guibor Family Office / Financière Saint-James · Venture capital · June 2023. Screening opportunities and summarizing investment cases.

Macroeconomics research · Pakistan

From September 2025 to January 2026, I conducted independent macroeconomics research titled “Filling the Tax Gap: How Fiscal Reforms Can Expand Pakistan’s Revenue.” I examined fiscal reforms in the retail and real-estate sectors, estimated their potential contribution to government revenue, and presented my findings to Pakistani government officials.

Interests

Gabriel as a child in a colorful art studio

Piano, guitar
& composition

I play piano and guitar and am interested in orchestral composition. I have composed many préludes and sérénades, I have concluded my first piano concerto and am on path to finishing my first symphony.

My favorite composers are Rachmaninov, Ravel and Debussy, although I draw a lot of inspiration from Chopin and Bach. I sometimes write about musical composition, like for example what it means for a piece to be sad.

Recently, I've been very into electronic music. Inspired by Daft Punk, I've been learning Ableton with an Akai APC64, and experimenting with AI tools in music production.