I’m Luke Paxton. Square Mile is where I build after hours.

I started by building things that did not exist yet, first in architecture, then in software. The tools changed. The instinct did not. I read a system the way an architect reads a building and the way a founder reads a market: structure first, then the way people actually move through it. Every stage taught me the same lesson from a new angle. Build the smallest honest version, put it in front of the world, and let contact teach you the rest.

The architect, the designer, the founder, and the builder are the same person. They just picked up different tools in different decades.

One method carries through all of it: understand deeply, build the smallest real version, learn from contact with the world, repeat.

I have one method, and I use it everywhere. Understand the problem deeply enough that I could explain it to the person living it. Build the smallest version that is actually real, not a mockup. Put it in front of the world and watch what breaks. Then do it again. Novel enough to matter, solid enough to ship. That gap is where I live.

This is where the work that has no client goes. Long essays on AI and design, and shorter speculative pieces, sometimes under a pen name when the idea travels better without my name on it. Generative art written in code, where the rules make the image. Prototypes that exist only to answer a question I could not stop thinking about. You can see the built work in the projects section and read the writing in the essays. None of it is trying to sell you anything. It is just made in the open, on my own terms.

In 2026 I am mentoring a cohort of early-stage fintech founders across Europe through the Frontier Founder Fellowship, run with Unknown Campus. My first patent covered authenticating a credential through pulses of colored light. A second is in progress. Mostly I am following the current set of questions: how AI earns trust inside real financial tools, how design holds up under compliance, what a system feels like to the person on the other side of it. If any of that overlaps with what you are working on, I am always open to a good conversation.