Luke Igel

Luke Igel is a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) class of 2023. His earlier affiliations include SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry, NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Slack, Common Sense Machines and MIT CSAIL; his roles and dates are not public.⁠[1]

He worked on the self-driving system of the Mars Perseverance rover at JPL and on SpaceX’s StarlinkStarlinkStarlink is a satellite broadband service supporting video calls, streaming and communications in remote locations.Open the full entry satellite constellation.⁠[2]

He co-directed the feature-length documentary MIT: Regressions with Wesley Block.⁠[2]

The two met through MIT’s Phi Kappa Theta chapter and began the film in fall 2020 as a parody of Adam Curtis’s documentaries; it premiered in 2022, and its footage-heavy production led to Kino AI.⁠[3]

In 2022 he was listed as a TEDxMIT speaker under the name Lucas Igel, described as “CS @ MIT & Creator/Producer of MIT Regressions.”⁠[4]

In 2022 he founded Kino AI, a San Francisco company.⁠[5]

In late 2022 the company joined the HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and MIT Prod program, and raised seed funding from Pioneer Fund and Y Combinator in undisclosed amounts.⁠[3]

In 2023 Kino AI joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 batch (S23).⁠[1]

In June 2025 he appeared as Kino AI’s chief executive on the On Production podcast and argued for “using these things more as discriminators than generators.”⁠[6]

In November 2025 he and Riley Walz turned about 20,000 emails into the Jmail website in about five hours; he stressed that it is a parody, not a clone.⁠[7]

Jmail presents Jeffrey Epstein’s emails released by the House Oversight Committee in a Gmail-style interface. He said they used a large language model to turn the PDF text back into email format, adding, “Riley and I do not support these people.”⁠[8]

He pitched the idea to Walz after struggling to parse the emails, recalling, “I was a freshman in college when the story broke.”⁠[9]

Jmail credits Igel and Walz as its creators and Kino AI as its publisher.⁠[10]

He said, “A little bit of new software can make a lot of these things that are happening in the world easier to understand.”⁠[11]

By February 2026 Jmail had drawn more than 25 million unique visitors and 450 million page views since its latest release; apart from about $10,000 he invested at the start, it runs on donations with more than ten volunteers. He said, “I think we are doing a newer form of journalism.”⁠[12]

Responding to pressure to take the site down, he said, “No one can strong-arm us into shutting down.”⁠[9]

Kino AI earlier positioned its product as a tool for organizing footage for film and television studios.⁠[13]

Kino AI presents itself as a video editor and media manager for teams and AI agents.⁠[14]