gen-z-founder
(9)
Eli Wachs
Eli Wachs is the co-founder and CEO of Footprint, a New York identity verification company building what he calls the identity layer for the internet. Footprint helps banks, real estate firms, auto dealers, and other businesses onboard customers by automating KYC and fraud checks while storing personal data inside secure enclaves. A Stanford economics and history graduate and former General Atlantic investor, Wachs started the company in 2022 with CTO Alex Grinman and has raised roughly $20 million to pursue a blunt goal: reduce digital identity theft toward zero while giving people more control over their own data.
Steven Schwartz
Steven Schwartz is the co-founder and CEO of Whop, a New York-based digital marketplace where people buy and sell software, courses, communities, and other digital products. He started building and selling iOS sneaker bots from his bedroom at 13 with future co-founder Cameron Zoub, ran through roughly two dozen side hustles, and launched Whop in 2021. The company reached a reported $1.6 billion valuation, processes billions in annual commerce, and Schwartz says it has minted over 650 millionaires. Backed by Peter Thiel, Insight Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Tether, he pitches a future where work is fun and money worries are obsolete.
Alina Su
Alina Su is the co-founder and CEO of Generation Lab, a San Francisco longevity startup building an at-home cheek-swab test that measures biological age across organs and systems. She got her first medical device patent at 15, founded the needle-free injection company NovaXS, left a Harvard Medical School PhD to commercialize aging science from UC Berkeley's Conboy Lab, and made Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023. Generation Lab has raised about $11M and counts geneticist George Church and Aubrey de Grey among its advisors.
Miriam Haart
Miriam Haart is the founder and CEO of ActionAI, a Reliable AI company building auditable, accountable infrastructure for mission-critical enterprise workflows. A Stanford computer science graduate who became the department's youngest lecturer at 19, she built her first iOS app at 13 after YouTubing 'how to make an app.' Known to millions from the Netflix series My Unorthodox Life, she has shipped more than ten apps, given a TED talk on independent thinking, and in April 2026 raised a $10 million seed round to fix AI's trust problem.
Rhim Shah
Rhim Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Arva AI, a Y Combinator and Google AI Fund-backed startup building auditable AI agents that automate financial crime compliance reviews for banks and fintechs. An Oxford engineering graduate who led the FinCrime product team at Revolut Business, he spent hundreds of hours shadowing compliance analysts before deciding the mundane, repetitive work of AML, KYB and KYC could be done faster and deeper by AI. Arva now automates as much as 80-92% of manual review work and counts leading UK and US banks among its customers.
Yoyo Chang
Yoyo Chang is the Taiwan-born British founder and CEO of Kody, a payments and physical-commerce platform he started as a high-school cafeteria project to kill lunch queues. A self-taught teenage stock trader who ploughed his own trading profits into the company, he raised the business through a $20M Series A in 2024 and pushed its annualised processing volume toward $1 billion, all before turning 25.
Adarsh Hiremath
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO of Mercor, the AI-powered talent marketplace connecting domain experts with AI labs for model training, evaluation, and data creation. At 22, he dropped out of Harvard, received a Thiel Fellowship, and co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon idea into a $10 billion company generating over $500 million in annual revenue - making him one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires alongside co-founders Brendan Foody and Surya Midha.
Nico Laqua
Nico Laqua is the 26-year-old co-founder and CEO/CTO of Corgi, the AI-native full-stack insurance carrier that went from zero to unicorn ($1.3B valuation) in under two years. A Columbia neuroscience Rabi Scholar turned serial founder, he built Basket Entertainment into a gaming publisher with 200M+ monthly active users before pivoting to reinvent commercial insurance for startups. Corgi raised $268M total - including a $160M Series B in May 2026 - and became the first AI-native licensed insurance carrier purpose-built for technology companies.
Chungin Lee
Chungin 'Roy' Lee is the 21-year-old Korean-American CEO and co-founder of Cluely, the AI startup that went viral in April 2025 with the tagline 'cheat on everything.' After having his Harvard acceptance rescinded in high school and later being suspended from Columbia University for academic integrity violations tied to Interview Coder - an AI tool he built to help engineers pass technical interviews - Lee dropped out, rebranded the product as Cluely, and raised $20.3M including a $15M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz. Cluely is a real-time AI meeting assistant that monitors screen content and audio to provide invisible live coaching during meetings, interviews, and sales calls.