teenage-founder
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Aayam Bansal
Aayam Bansal is the 18-year-old co-founder and CEO of Synthetic Sciences (YC W26), a company building AI co-scientists that run the full research loop - literature, hypotheses, experiments, and paper drafts. Before college he had already patented and sold an AI orthopaedic device and built COVID-19 helpline infrastructure serving tens of thousands of Indians daily. He met co-founder Ishaan Gangwani doing machine learning research at NUS, CMU, and MIT CSAIL, publishing at venues like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, and CVPR. After a paper rejection convinced them the research process itself was broken, the pair raised roughly $1.5M and dropped out before their first college semester to fix it.
Tom Hadfield
Tom Hadfield is the British entrepreneur and CEO of Mio, an Austin-based company that makes enterprise chat tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Chat talk to each other. He is the kid who built Soccernet with his dad at 12 and sold it to ESPN for $40 million at 17, attended Harvard, ran a biotech, then went through Y Combinator to attack the problem of messaging interoperability with backing from Khosla Ventures, Cisco and Zoom.