Adarsh Hiremath, cofounder and CTO of Mercor, has emerged as one of the youngest billionaires of the AI era after helping build the company into a fast-rising platform that connects expert talent with AI labs and enterprises. Launched in 2023 with Brendan Foody and Surya Midha, Mercor sits at the intersection of recruiting, human expertise, and artificial intelligence, as companies use specialized professionals to train and evaluate advanced models. Known for a low public profile and deep technical role, Hiremath has become one of the standout new fortunes of the AI boom.

Surya Midha, cofounder and chairman of Mercor, has emerged as one of the youngest self-made billionaires of the AI era after helping build the company into a fast-scaling platform that connects elite professionals with AI labs and enterprises. Launched in 2023 with fellow young founders Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath, Mercor sits at the intersection of recruiting, human expertise, and artificial intelligence, as businesses use specialized talent to train and evaluate advanced models. Known for a low public profile and extraordinary early success, Midha has become one of the standout new fortunes of the AI boom.

Brendan Foody, cofounder and CEO of Mercor, has emerged as one of the youngest billionaires of the AI era by building a fast-scaling company that helps top AI labs and enterprises source expert talent to train and evaluate models. After launching Mercor in 2023 with fellow young founders, he turned it into one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched startups, positioned at the intersection of recruiting, human expertise, and artificial intelligence. Known for speed, ambition, and sharp execution, Foody has become one of the standout new faces of the AI boom.

Ivan Zhao, cofounder and CEO of Notion, built one of the most influential productivity software companies of the modern era by turning a minimalist workspace tool into a global platform for notes, docs, databases, and collaboration. With a design-led philosophy and a strong focus on flexible software, he helped grow Notion into a company valued at $10 billion, positioning it at the center of the convergence of productivity, knowledge management, and AI.

Vasily Shikin, chief technology officer of AppLovin, helped build the company into one of the most powerful platforms in mobile advertising and app monetization. After joining in 2012, he became a central technical force behind AppLovin’s software and infrastructure as it grew into a major public company at the center of performance marketing. Known for a low public profile but enormous financial upside, Shikin stands out as one of the key executives behind AppLovin’s rise.

Christopher Olah, Anthropic cofounder and one of AI’s most influential interpretability researchers, has built his reputation by trying to open the black box of neural networks. After pioneering key work on neural network visualization and mechanistic interpretability at Google Brain and OpenAI, he helped launch Anthropic in 2021, where his research has become central to the company’s safety-first approach to advanced AI systems. As Anthropic’s influence has surged, Olah has emerged as one of the most important technical minds shaping how frontier AI is understood—not just built.

Sam McCandlish, Anthropic cofounder and former chief technology officer, helped build one of the defining companies of the generative AI era while shaping the technical foundations behind Claude and Anthropic’s broader safety-driven approach to frontier models. A theoretical physicist by training and former OpenAI researcher, he became known for influential work on AI scaling and compute, then played a central role in Anthropic’s rise from high-conviction startup to one of the world’s most valuable AI companies. He later moved into the role of chief architect, underscoring his importance as one of the key technical minds behind Anthropic’s long-term direction.

Jack Clark, Anthropic cofounder and Head of Public Benefit, has become one of the most influential figures at the intersection of frontier AI, policy, and public communication. A former technology journalist turned AI executive, he helped build Anthropic into one of the defining companies of the generative AI era while shaping its voice on safety, governance, and societal impact. Known for translating complex technical progress into strategic public arguments, Clark stands out as one of the sector’s clearest policy-minded operators.

Tom Brown, cofounder and chief compute officer of Anthropic, helped build one of the defining companies of the generative AI era after earlier playing a key role in the engineering behind GPT-3 at OpenAI. At Anthropic, he has been central to the compute infrastructure powering Claude and the company’s broader push to develop powerful AI systems with a strong emphasis on safety and reliability. With deep technical credibility and a low public profile, Brown has emerged as one of the key architects behind Anthropic’s rise.

Kevin Marchetti, cofounder and co-executive chairman of Lineage, helped build the company into the world’s largest temperature-controlled warehousing and logistics platform. Through Bay Grove, the investment firm he cofounded with Adam Forste, he backed an ambitious consolidation strategy that transformed a fragmented cold-storage market into a global infrastructure business spanning hundreds of facilities across multiple continents. Known for disciplined long-term investing and operational scale, Marchetti has become one of the central figures in modern cold-chain logistics.

Jon Winkelried, CEO of TPG, is a veteran Wall Street executive who helped lead Goldman Sachs before taking the helm at one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers. Since joining TPG in 2015 and becoming sole CEO in 2021, he has played a central role in scaling the firm’s reach across private equity, credit, real estate, and impact investing. Known for strategic discipline and institutional gravitas, Winkelried has become one of the most influential figures in modern private markets.

Andrew Dudum, cofounder and CEO of Hims & Hers Health, has built one of the most visible direct-to-consumer healthcare platforms in the U.S., turning telehealth into a mainstream brand across sexual health, mental health, dermatology, and weight care. Since launching the company in 2016, he has expanded it from a niche startup into a publicly traded digital health business known for sharp branding, subscription economics, and aggressive category expansion. Dudum has emerged as a defining entrepreneur in modern consumer healthcare, blending startup speed with public-market scale.

Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, became one of the most recognizable young figures in artificial intelligence by building a company that supplies the data infrastructure, model evaluation, and operational tooling behind modern AI systems. After cofounding Scale in 2016, he scaled it into a critical partner for leading AI labs, enterprises, and government agencies, helping position the company at the center of the generative AI boom. In 2025, Wang stepped down as CEO to join Meta as its Chief AI Officer while remaining on Scale’s board, underscoring his growing influence across the highest levels of the AI industry.

Zach Perret, cofounder and CEO of Plaid, built one of the most important financial infrastructure companies in fintech by making bank-account connectivity a core layer of the digital economy. Since launching Plaid in 2012, Perret has helped turn the company into a trusted data network powering payments, lending, investing, and personal finance apps used by millions of consumers and businesses. Under his leadership, Plaid has expanded from account-linking tools into a broader platform for open finance, fraud, and identity products, cementing its role as a foundational enabler of modern financial services.

William Hockey, cofounder of Plaid, helped build one of the most important financial infrastructure companies powering the modern fintech ecosystem. As an early leader of Plaid, he played a central role in scaling the platform that connects consumer bank accounts to apps and financial services used by millions worldwide. After helping grow Plaid into a core payments and data connectivity layer for fintech, Hockey went on to found Column, a technology-driven banking platform aimed at modernizing financial infrastructure from the ground up. His career reflects deep influence across the architecture of digital finance.

William S. Fisher, founder and CEO of Manzanita Capital, is a discreet, long-horizon investor who built a London-based private investment firm focused on premium consumer and luxury brands. A member of the founding family behind Gap Inc., Fisher also serves as a director of the retailer, bringing decades of global retail experience shaped by his earlier leadership of Gap’s international expansion. Through Manzanita, he has pursued brand-led value creation with patient capital, operating with a low public profile while maintaining influence across consumer businesses and governance.

Vlad Vendrow, chief technology officer of RingCentral, has played a key role in building one of the leading global cloud communications platforms powering enterprise voice, video, and messaging. As an early engineering leader and longtime technology executive at the company, Vendrow helped architect RingCentral’s shift from legacy telephony toward scalable, cloud-native communications infrastructure used by businesses worldwide. Known for deep technical expertise and product-focused execution, he has been central to the company’s evolution into a major unified communications SaaS provider.

Vlad Shmunis, founder and CEO of RingCentral, built one of the most successful cloud communications platforms by anticipating the shift from on-premise phone systems to software-based enterprise voice and messaging. After launching RingCentral in 1999, Shmunis guided its transformation into a global unified communications leader serving businesses with cloud telephony, video, and collaboration tools. Under his leadership, the company scaled internationally, formed major partnerships, and became a publicly traded SaaS powerhouse, helping redefine how organizations communicate in the digital workplace.

Tony Xu is the billionaire co-founder and CEO of DoorDash. In early 2026, he is leading a massive "AI-native" overhaul to unify international brands like Wolt and Deliveroo into a single global tech stack. Beyond scaling autonomous delivery with the "DoorDash Dot" robot, Xu is a vocal proponent of human-led fulfillment in the face of rising AI agents. A Meta board member and signatory of the Giving Pledge, he focuses his philanthropy on underfunded "dreamers and doers." His current strategy prioritizes long-term engineering leverage as the company expands into retail and grocery.

Tom Preston-Werner is the billionaire co-founder of GitHub and a defining figure in open-source software, having created SemVer, TOML, and Jekyll. Now a General Partner at Preston-Werner Ventures (PWV), he focuses on "founder-first" investing. In early 2026, he launched PWV Fund I, a $100M vehicle to lead pre-seed and seed rounds for AI and software startups. A signatory of the Giving Pledge, he and his wife Theresa manage the Preston Werner Foundation, which supports climate resilience and global justice. Based in San Francisco, he remains a key mentor in the developer community, leveraging his experience to help builders navigate the ethical and technical challenges of the AI era.