Luca Maria Gambardella is co-founder and chief executive of Artificialy, the Lugano AI firm he started in 2020 with Marco Zaffalon, and a long-time AI researcher who directed IDSIA in Lugano for 25 years (Artificialy; personal site).
Research and teaching in Lugano
After a PhD in engineering sciences and technologies in Brussels and a visiting senior scientist stay at Berkeley, he became a professor at SUPSI and at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), where he directed the Master in Artificial Intelligence and, by his account, led IDSIA, the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, for 25 years until 2020 (personal site). His scientific work includes machine learning and ant-colony algorithms for logistics and swarm robotics, with more than 300 publications and an h-index of 73 on his own summary (personal site).
Building Artificialy
He co-founded Artificialy in Lugano in 2020 to turn research AI into industry systems and was appointed chief executive as the firm grew; a 2025 company note put the team at about 40 professionals between Lugano and Zurich (Artificialy; Artificialy). When UBS made a strategic investment in early 2026, he said UBS was “not only investing in our company - they are also one of our most valued clients,” and that the mix of capital and operational work would ground growth in real deployments (Artificialy; Startupticker).
On his personal site he has described Artificialy’s challenge as creating solutions that are “reliable, but above all understandable, sustainable and on a human scale,” instead of science-fiction robots (personal site). He has also written novels and co-created public AI art installations in Ticino (personal site).