Rory O'Reilly is the CEO and co-founder of Knot, a New York fintech building the API layer that lets people switch the card on file across hundreds of merchants like Netflix and Amazon in a single tap. A Thiel Fellow and Harvard dropout, he built Knot with his brother Kieran after a decade of ventures together - turning YouTube clips into viral GIFs at gifs.com, riding an early Ethereum wave, and running Millions, the gamified debit card that became the biggest challenger bank on TikTok. Knot raised a $10M Series A led by Nava Ventures with Amex Ventures and Plaid backing.
Flex is an AI-native private banking platform for high-net-worth, middle-market business owners. It bundles credit, business and personal banking, payments, AP automation, expense management, and ERP-style tooling into a single super app aimed at owner-operators of $3M-$100M revenue companies.
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.
Brendan Foody is the 22-year-old co-founder and CEO of Mercor, the AI talent and data company that became a $10 billion decacorn in under two years. A Georgetown dropout and former Thiel Fellow from Menlo Park, California, Foody co-founded Mercor with high school debate teammates Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha at a São Paulo hackathon in early 2023. Mercor connects AI labs — including OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic — with domain experts (scientists, doctors, lawyers, bankers) who train frontier AI models through human feedback, growing from $1M to $500M in annual run rate within 17 months and making Foody one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires.
Julián Ríos Cantú is the co-founder and CEO of Eden, the leading cloud-native radiology operating system in Latin America. Motivated by his mother's battle with breast cancer, he began building health technology at age 16, went on to become the youngest-ever winner of the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards at 18, earned a Thiel Fellowship, and went through Y Combinator in 2018. Today, Eden processes over 13 million diagnostic studies annually across 18 countries for more than 2,200 medical institutions, backed by Sierra Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kaszek, and notable angel investors including Leonardo DiCaprio, Ashton Kutcher, and Tony Robbins.
Surya Midha is a 22-year-old co-founder and Chairman of Mercor, the AI-powered talent platform valued at $10 billion. A Thiel Fellow, national debate champion, and Georgetown dropout, Midha co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon into a company paying 30,000+ contractors over $1.5 million daily, matching elite human intelligence with AI labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. In 2026, he became one of the youngest people ever to appear on the Forbes World's Billionaires List with a net worth of $2.2 billion.
Zaid Rahman is the founder and CEO of Flex, an AI-native private bank and finance super app targeting mid-market business owners with $3M-$100M in revenue. A Thiel Fellow who left Columbia University to build companies, he previously founded Volley (an AI knowledge startup backed by JPMorgan and Zuckerberg Ventures) and an EdTech platform that was acquired. Inspired by watching his father's Dubai construction business nearly collapse due to a payment default, he co-founded Flex in 2022 to build the all-in-one financial platform that mid-market owners never had. Flex has raised $490.5M in total funding, reached $3B in annualized TPV, and became the first US fintech to launch a Visa Infinite Business credit card.
James Graham is the founder and CEO of Community Phone, a San Francisco-based telecommunications company that replaces traditional landlines with a cell-tower-connected device requiring no internet. Backed by Y Combinator, recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30, and a Thiel Fellow, Graham built Community Phone after watching his grandmother get sold a $1,000 phone she didn't need by a major carrier. The company now serves 25,000+ customers across all 50 U.S. states with no contracts, no hidden fees, and a 3-year price lock - principles that mirror Graham's belief that technology should serve people, not exploit them.
Connor Zwick is the CEO and co-founder of Speak, an AI-powered language learning platform that crossed $1 billion in valuation and $100 million in annualized revenue in 2024. A Thiel Fellow who dropped out of Harvard, Zwick built his first app at age 13 and sold Flashcards+ to Chegg as a teenager. He founded Speak in 2016 with Andrew Hsu, and spent years living between San Francisco and Seoul to perfect AI conversation technology for English learners. Today Speak counts over 15 million downloads, backing from OpenAI and Accel, and enterprise customers including KPMG and HD Hyundai.
Gavin Uberti is the co-founder and CEO of Etched, a Cupertino-based AI chip startup building the world's first transformer-specific ASIC called Sohu. A Harvard dropout and 2024 Thiel Fellow, Uberti co-founded Etched in 2022 alongside Chris Zhu and Robert Wachen after betting that transformer architecture would dominate AI for years to come. That bet has paid off spectacularly: Etched has raised over $625 million (including a $500M round in January 2026 at a $5 billion valuation), and Sohu claims to run transformer inference 20x faster than Nvidia's H100 at a fraction of the cost - positioning Etched as one of the most serious challengers to Nvidia's dominance in AI compute.
Noor Siddiqui is the founder and CEO of Orchid Health, a San Francisco-based biotech startup offering whole-genome sequencing for IVF embryos, screening for 1,200+ genetic variants. Motivated by watching her mother lose her sight to retinitis pigmentosa, she dropped out of high school at 17 to become one of the youngest Thiel Fellows, later returned to earn dual CS degrees at Stanford, and then built Orchid with $16.5M in funding from investors including 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki and Coinbase's Brian Armstrong. She is also the host of the podcast 'Conceivable with Noor.'
Joseph Semrai is a Thiel Fellow and serial AI builder who dropped out of Stanford at 20 to found Context, the world's first AI-native office suite. Context raised $11M in seed funding at a $70M valuation from Lux Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and General Catalyst, and launched to automate an estimated 2.5 trillion hours of annual knowledge work. Before Context, Semrai built Friday - the world's first internet-connected LLM chatbot (later acquired by Andi Search) - and RealityGPT, a wearable GPT-4 device, as a Stanford freshman. He is known for assembling elite engineering teams and building AI products that reach millions of users.
Vitalik Buterin is the Russian-Canadian programmer who, at age 19, wrote the Ethereum whitepaper and changed what a blockchain could be. He turned a programmable ledger into an idea engine - smart contracts, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs - and then spent years fighting to keep it decentralized. He travels with a single suitcase, posts thousand-word blog essays at 2am, and once cried over a World of Warcraft nerf that indirectly launched a $200B ecosystem.
Shahed Khan is the co-founder of Loom, the async video messaging platform that grew from a Chrome extension to 25 million users across 350,000+ companies before being acquired by Atlassian for $975 million in 2023. A Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Khan started his entrepreneurial journey at 16 in suburban Chicago, founding Viatask before connecting with Joe Thomas and Vinay Hiremath to build Loom through two pivots and years of near-failure. He now lives in New York City, angel-investing in 40+ companies and staying active in the startup ecosystem.