David Choi is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Permian Labs, a company that develops financial protocols and operates hardware infrastructure. He is also the co-founder of USD.AI, a stablecoin lending platform designed to provide credit to artificial intelligence companies using graphics processing units (GPUs) as collateral. ^[1]

Education

David Choi studied at the University of Southern California, where he earned dual undergraduate degrees. He completed a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a focus on Finance from the Marshall School of Business and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History. ^[5]

Career

David Choi is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Permian Labs, established in 2021 alongside Conor Moore and Ivan Sergeev. At the company, he oversees strategic direction and its two primary divisions: the USD.AI protocol and Tactical Compute, a hardware infrastructure business. Under his leadership, USD.AI was developed to provide financing to smaller and emerging AI firms through loans collateralized by GPU hardware. The protocol issues USDai, a U.S. dollar–pegged stablecoin, and sUSDai, a yield-bearing version backed by compute revenue. By 2025, Permian Labs had raised $38 million in funding, managed $60 million in hardware globally, and facilitated more than $358 million in loan volume. In August 2025, the company announced a $13 million Series A funding round led by Framework Ventures with participation from investors including Dragonfly and Arbitrum.

Before founding Permian Labs, Choi was active through Taureon (since 2016), where he focused on blockchain research, mempool activity, and early-stage investments in projects such as Memeland, Ethena, Neutron, XAI Games, Chainflip, and Algorand. He was also recognized as a winner at ETHGlobal’s HackMoney 2021 hackathon.

Earlier in his career, Choi worked in investment banking at Deutsche Bank (2016–2018), contributing to transactions including Unibail-Rodamco’s $24.7 billion merger with Westfield Properties and Scientific Games’ $632 million acquisition of NYX Gaming. He also held roles at the Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund, focusing on growth equity in precision agriculture, and at ArtAssure Ltd., conducting art market research and supporting fine art finance and advisory services. ^{[1] [2] [5]}