# Charles Packer

> Charles Packer is the co-founder and CEO of Letta, the San Francisco startup building the memory layer for AI agents. He is the original author of MemGPT, the viral research project that reframed large language models as operating systems that manage their own memory. A UC Berkeley computer science PhD out of the BAIR and Sky Computing labs, Packer walked away from offers at OpenAI and Google DeepMind to build stateful agents that remember, learn, and improve after deployment - the layer he argues sits above the base models and separates a real agent from a chatbot with a nice interface.

- **Role:** Co-founder & CEO at Letta
- **Organizations:** Letta, UC Berkeley (BAIR), Sky Computing Lab, MemGPT
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Ph.D. in Computer Science (AI, reinforcement learning, LLM agents), UC Berkeley
- **Known for:** Authored MemGPT, the research that reframed LLMs as operating systems managing their own memory, Grew MemGPT to 10,000+ GitHub stars through organic developer adoption before commercializing, Co-founded Letta and raised a $10M seed round led by Felicis Ventures

## Career timeline

- **2019-2024** — PhD researcher at UC Berkeley, affiliated with BAIR and Sky Computing Lab (formerly RISELab/AMPLab); work spanned reinforcement learning and autonomous driving
- **2023** — Published MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems; the open-source repo crossed 10,000+ GitHub stars
- **2024** — Co-founded Letta with Sarah Wooders; the company emerged from stealth in September 2024 with a $10M seed round led by Felicis
- **2025** — Letta ships Letta Code, the Agent File (.af) open standard, and sleep-time compute; Packer headlines workshops and talks on stateful agents

## Achievements

- Authored MemGPT, the research that reframed LLMs as operating systems managing their own memory
- Grew MemGPT to 10,000+ GitHub stars through organic developer adoption before commercializing
- Co-founded Letta and raised a $10M seed round led by Felicis Ventures
- Attracted angel backing from Jeff Dean (Google DeepMind), Clem Delangue (Hugging Face), Cristobal Valenzuela (Runway) and Robert Nishihara (Anyscale)
- Completed a UC Berkeley CS PhD with a thesis on building agentic systems in the era of large language models
- Coined and popularized the term 'stateful agents' in the AI community

## Latest updates

- **2025-07** — Featured talk: Letta - Building Stateful AI Agents with Memory and Sleep-Time Compute.
- **2025-04** — Led a full workshop on Stateful Agents covering MemGPT and Letta.
- **2025** — Letta released Letta Code, a memory-first open-source coding agent, and the Agent File (.af) open standard for portable agents.

## Links

- Website: https://charlespacker.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-packer
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/charlespacker
- GitHub: https://github.com/cpacker
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZJGVUJUtlw

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/charles-packer
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-25