Meet the young AI startup founders raising millions in the race to build the next big thing

Zach Yadegari, 18, sold his first video gaming app at age 16 for almost $100,000 and used the proceeds to fund Cal AI, an AI-powered nutrition app he co-founded.

He first discovered an interest in coding at a coding camp his parents sent him to when he was 7. For years, he'd spend hours watching people program video games on YouTube and try to emulate them.

He got the idea for Cal AI while trying to bulk up at the gym and quickly learning that most results come from diet. So, he and his co-founders set out to build a calorie-tracking app that integrates AI technology.

Over the last year and a half, the app has taken off, generating around $30 million in annual revenue and employing a 30-person team, Yadegari told BI reporter Agnes Applegate in October.

Carina Hong, 24, is on a mission to build a superintelligent reasoning system through her AI startup, Axiom Math.

Hong, a Rhodes Scholar, dropped out of her graduate studies at Stanford to found the company in March and has since hired top talent across Meta's Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab, Meta's GenAI team, and Google Brain.

"One thing I heard from some of the top researchers and mathematicians I've recruited to Axiom is that solving for mathematical superintelligence will be their legacy," Hong told BI reporter Geoff Weiss in December. "When the problem is hard enough, talent density gets very high, and that makes you a magnet for other great thinkers."

And Hong isn't only recruiting from Big Tech. She has also hired her former professor, the renowned mathematician Ken Ono.

Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 18, dropped out of high school in Kazakhstan in March 2025 to pursue his AI coding agents startup, Nozomio, at Y Combinator, a startup accelerator for many young founders.

Both of his parents are entrepreneurs, so his entrepreneurial journey began at a young age. He taught himself coding and built his first company at 15.

His journey to Y Combinator wasn't easy. He applied twice before finally getting accepted the third time. Even though he didn't have a Stanford PhD, he was told his YC partner selected him because he ships fast, which is critical in the age of AI, he told BI's Weiss in September.

Phoebe Gates, daughter of Bill Gates, and Sophia Kianni launched an AI-powered shopping assistant in April and said it had reached 600,000 users by October, when they spoke with BI's Jordan Hart.

Both 23 at the time of their interview, Kianni and Gates met as roommates at Stanford University, where they conceived the idea for Phia.

Phia is a free app and browser extension that uses AI to help compare prices on fashion items across tens of thousands of linked sites to help users find deals.

The duo raised $8 million in a seed funding round in September, led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and featuring investors such as Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, and Michael Rubin.

Toby Brown, 16, has been fascinated with tech from a young age. His parents aren't in tech, but that hasn't stopped him from teaching himself to code everything, from math games to alarm systems.

In 2023, he developed the concept for his AI project Beem. "I can't share too much about it," he told BI's Joshua Nelken-Zitser in October. "I hope that if done right, it will redefine how people interact with technology."

He dedicated his summer break 2024 to pitching to firms and other potential investors in London, New York, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco. "There was nobody to coach me on pitching to investors, so I just took a maniacal approach of bashing away at it until I got the right solution," he said.

In November 2024, he got a call from South Park Commons, founded by some of Facebook's early engineers, saying they wanted to invest $1 million in Beem. Instead of finishing school exams the following year, he left the UK to pursue his project in Silicon Valley.

One day in her Harvard University dorm room, Alyx van der Vorm felt lonely. Her friends were out of town, and while she could easily open an app to order food or stream a movie, she wanted more. Enter Clyx.

Van der Vorm, 25, founded the social app in 2020 and has since rolled it out in four major cities worldwide: Miami, London, New York, and São Paulo.

Clyx is a social app that leverages AI to connect people in real life. It utilizes AI-powered tools to scrape events from across the web, converts those events into meetups within the app, and then helps identify which of your friends are attending the event or matches you with new connections if you don't know anyone going.

At the time of reporting, Clyx had 50,0000 active users joining events and about 200,000 looking at events, BI's Sydney Bradley reported in September.

Mathieu Rihet, 19, saw the inefficiencies of the healthcare system firsthand while working as a medical translator. So, he set out to try and fix some of it.

He met Georges Casassovici, 18, via his LinkedIn post seeking a non-technical cofounder to build with. Together, the two of them founded Novoflow, an AI startup that builds AI agents for medical clinics to help automate tasks, starting with cancellation recovery and appointment booking.

Both told BI's Weiss in November that they have no plans to pursue a college degree after leaving school to join Y Combinator's Spring 2025 class.

Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, both 20, met in sixth grade, and by high school, they were coding and building viral apps together, including a Christmas light installation app that made $60,000 in annual revenue one year.

When they both started college in 2023, Dhawan said he struggled to take notes and listen to the teacher at the same time. So, he and Arora set out to build an AI-powered notetaking app called Turbo AI. It's attracting 20,000 new users per day, BI's Lakshmi Varanasi reported in November.

Since launching Turbo AI, they've both now dropped out of college and say their startup is on track to earn eight-figures in annual recurring revenue.

College juniors Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow say LinkedIn has become bloated with vanity metrics like follower counts and likes, which distract from the professional qualities that matter when landing a job.

So, they launched their own AI social network while attending Yale. Skipping the likes and clicks, Series connects professionals over text message. The idea is that it only focuses on who you are and what you can bring to the table, Hargow told BI's Bradley in April.

Balancing college and a startup isn't easy. Johnson later told BI's Nelken Zitser that he often ends up working 120-hour weeks to manage both.

Over the summer, 19-year-old Christine Zhang turned down an internship to spend two months living in a hacker house. There, she built a startup with her college roommate and cofounder, and by the end of the summer, they'd raised $1 million for it.

Instead of returning to Harvard, she's taking a gap year to stay in San Francisco and help scale her startup, which has grown to six people, she told BI's Applegate in October.

"I miss a lot of things about school. I had to delete my Instagram during the first week of classes so I wouldn't get FOMO. However, I don't regret my decision," she said.

Early this year, Aidan Guo, 19, and Julian Windeck, 23, launched their startup, Attention Engineering, which is essentially a desktop assistant powered by AI to automate everything you do on your computer, much like a "cursor for everything," Guo told BI's Varanasi in November.

Guo said he's on his "second gap year" from college. He found encouraging mentors by joining programs like Z Fellows and Emergent Ventures. Ultimately, he decided to forgo Carnegie Mellon and move to the Bay Area to build his startup.

Windeck studied computer science in Germany and at Cambridge University, and then conducted AI research at MIT before deciding academia wasn't for him.

The two met through mutual friends, discovered they worked well together, and have since raised over $1 million from noteworthy backers, including Lukas Haas, a product manager at Google DeepMind, Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegal, the cofounders of Interaction, and Bryan Pellegrino, the cofounder of LayerZero.

Jay Neo, 21, has been studying what makes a video go viral since he was a teen.

At 18, he landed a job with MrBeast, helping make short-form video content and learning the ins and outs of how the YouTube mogul grows his business and popularity. For the last year and a half, however, Neo has been focused on his own AI startup called Palo.

Palo is a content creator's assistant. It utilizes AI to analyze a creator's entire catalog and then writes scripts for short-form videos with related themes, outlining content with storyboards. It also has its own network, where creators can follow one another.

Large-language AI models "are a perfect thing not for replacing the creator, but for analyzing every little thing," Neo told BI's Bradley in November.

Shraman and Shreyas Kar, 19 and 20, participated in hackathons together throughout middle and high school.

They were busy studying at Stanford when they were accepted to Y Combinator, and seeing their peers take the risk and drop out of Stanford gave them the courage to do so, too.

They began working on their AI startup, Golpo, while at Stanford. Golpo generates animated explainer videos from documents and prompts. For example, customers can use it to create interactive lessons for school districts or training programs for work.

As of mid-October, 14,000 people had generated videos with Golpo, Shraman Kar told BI's Weiss.

George Cheng and Dylan Nguyen, both 19, dropped out of MIT as freshmen and raised $2.7 million in seed funding out of Y Combinator for their tech startup Code Four, which aims to arm police officers with AI.

They say their technology can generate reports from bodycam footage for record-keeping, redact footage and reports for records requests, and generate transcriptions and summaries from video interviews and security footage. Basically, it aims to reduce the time spent on paperwork, allowing officers to dedicate more time in the field.

Code Four is working with 25 police departments, BI's Weiss reported in November. While Code Four uses AI to generate preliminary drafts of reports, officers review and edit them for accuracy, Cheng said.

"Many of the great AI companies of the next decade are being built right now, and I want to be a part of that," Raymond Zhao told BI's Nelken-Zitser in October.

Zhao studied math and statistics at the University of Oxford, thinking he wanted to enter the financial sector. However, after an uninspiring internship at Goldman Sachs, Zhao ultimately pursued AI instead.

While at Oxford, he joined the venture capital society, which introduced him to a network of VCs, founders, and one of his future cofounders. They've raised about $1 million in pre-seed funding for their AI startup, Structured AI, and are pursuing it further at Y Combinator.

Structured AI builds AI agents that can perform quality control on technical documents and drawings. It's laying the groundwork for the AI workforce for construction design and engineering.

David Kobrosky, 26, dropped out of college twice. The first time was to work for businessman and social media personality Gary Vaynerchuk, at his company VaynerX. The second was to launch his own company, Intros AI.

Kobrosky said he always thought AI would play a huge role in how humans interact, and that's exactly what Intros AI does. Intros AI was acquired by software company Bevy in July.

Companies can use Intros AI's product to connect their most active customers to each other, creating a space for knowledge sharing and networking that helps boost their customer retention, BI's Charissa Cheong reported in November.

Kobrosky didn't disclose the amount he sold Intros AI for, but he is now an AI product manager at Bevy, earning over $100,000 a year, plus bonuses. "I think starting and selling a company sets me up for the future in a way that a more traditional path wouldn't have," he told Cheong.