mit-dropout
(5)
Karun Kaushik
Karun Kaushik is the co-founder and CEO of Delve, a San Francisco AI compliance startup he launched in 2023 with fellow MIT student Selin Kocalar after the pair dropped out sophomore year. What began as an AI medical scribe pivoted into automated SOC 2, HIPAA and ISO 27001 compliance after the founders ran into the paperwork themselves. Delve raced through Y Combinator to a $32M Series A led by Insight Partners at a reported $300M valuation, landed both founders on Forbes 30 Under 30, and served more than 1,500 companies before a 2026 whistleblower controversy put its audit practices under a harsh spotlight.
Lawrence Chen
Lawrence Chen (Chen Haoliang) is the founder and CEO of SpeakIn Technologies, a Shenzhen-based voiceprint recognition company he started in 2015. An MIT dropout who previously worked on Google Glass's human-machine interaction program, Chen built SpeakIn to verify identities through voice rather than passwords, claiming 99.5% accuracy and selling into Chinese banks and public security bureaus. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2018.
Sajith Wickramasekara
Sajith (Saji) Wickramasekara is the co-founder and CEO of Benchling, the R&D cloud platform used by more than 200,000 scientists across pharma, biotech, and academia. He took leave from MIT in 2012 to rebuild the software scientists use at the bench, and has stayed in the CEO seat as the company grew to a roughly $6 billion valuation.
Michael Truell
Michael Truell is the 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor — the AI-native code editor that reached $2 billion ARR faster than any SaaS company in history. A former Google intern and MIT dropout who won the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize and IOI medals in high school, Truell co-founded Cursor in 2022 with three MIT classmates, launching it publicly in March 2023. By November 2025, Cursor had raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation — and in April 2026, SpaceX secured an option to acquire the company for $60 billion. Truell's north star: replace coding itself with something better.
Alexandr Wang
Alexandr Wang is the co-founder of Scale AI and current Chief AI Officer at Meta Platforms. Born in 1997 to Chinese immigrant physicists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, he dropped out of MIT at 19 to build Scale AI, which became the backbone of AI training data infrastructure for companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Defense. By 24, he was the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Scale AI grew to a ~$29B valuation after Meta's $14.8B strategic investment in 2025, and Wang now leads Meta's AI superintelligence efforts.