Company

Sphere is an operating system for the transfer of money over the internet. Digital payments of all modalities are paving the way for merchants from under-addressed emerging markets to access cost-effective, secure, and near instant cross-border payments. In the same way that an operating system is the fundamental interface between a computer and a user. Sphere is building the software that connects end-users with these payment networks.

Through beautiful and accessible graphic user interfaces (GUIs), Sphere orchestrates financial service providers to make digital payments accessible.

People

Sphere began with a global hackathon win sponsored by Stripe. Co-founders Arnold Lee and Luigi Charles met as Columbia undergrads in 2015. Bonding over shared experiences of financial upheaval, they became best friends and built software together. Arnold grew up with parents born during the Korean War, who would eventually emigrate during South Korea's Third Republic dictatorship and after the Vietnam War.

Luigi's grew up in the Caribbean, seeing the effects of financial exclusion locally, he started his career at traditional asset managers such as Vanguard and Franklin Templeton. Given a family background in construction, Arnold got his first taste of distributed systems engineering at IoT startups. Accelerating global financial inclusion is at the heart of what brings Sphere together.