Abuzar Royesh is the founder and CEO of Pastel (DataServe AI), a U.S.- and Nigeria-based company building agentic AI software that helps regional, mid-tier, and community banks automate onboarding, compliance, fraud detection, and anti-money-laundering work. Born in Afghanistan and educated at Tufts and Stanford, where he was a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, he is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. He is also the founder and board chair of the 30 Birds Foundation, which evacuated more than 450 Afghans, mainly schoolgirls, after the 2021 Taliban takeover.
Avi Schiffmann is a 23-year-old American technologist and founder who first went viral at 17 when his hand-built COVID-19 tracker hit 36 million daily users. He dropped out of Harvard after one semester, built Ukraine Take Shelter to house 100,000 refugees, then bet nearly his entire $2.5M seed round on a single domain - spending $1.88M on friend.com. His company Friend makes a $99 AI pendant that listens to your life and texts back like a companion, sparking a national debate about loneliness, surveillance, and what it means to connect.
Zain Zaidi is the co-founder and CEO of TransCrypts, a blockchain-powered credential and employment verification platform he started after struggling to access his own college transcript as an SJSU student. Backed by Mark Cuban, Pantera Capital, and Techstars, he has grown the company to 450+ enterprise clients and 4 million users across 9 countries, raised $18M+, launched JustScreen (the world's first free background check service), and earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2026 — all before turning 30. His platform has also helped over 4,000 Ukrainian refugees access medical records.