AI startups mint new billionaires as investors chase next tech wave

The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has turned high-profile billionaires like Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, and Sam Altman, the chief executive of the ChatGPT maker OpenAI, into even richer billionaires.

  It has also produced a crop of new  billionaires — at least on paper — from smaller start-ups. These individuals may become future Silicon Valley power brokers like the wealthy executives created by past tech booms, including the late-1990s dot-com frenzy, who then invested in or helped steer later waves of technology. 

The new AI billionaires include Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo, who founded Scale AI, a data-labeling startup that received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta in June. The founders of the AI coding startup Cursor — Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Arvid Lunnemark — entered the billionaire ranks when their company was valued at $27 billion in a funding round last month.  The entrepreneurs behind Perplexity (an AI search engine), Mercor (an AI data start-up), Figure AI (a maker of humanoid robots), Safe Superintelligence (an AI lab), Harvey (an AI legal software startup) and Thinking Machines Lab (an AI lab) are in the nine-figure club as well, according to the companies or people close to the startups, as well as data from the startup tracker PitchBook and news reports. Most reached that point after the valuations of their privately held companies soared this year, turning their company stock into gold mines. 

Jai Das, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, likened the new billionaires to the railroad barons of the 1890s Gilded Age who leaned into that era’s technology boom. But he cautioned that their wealth could be fleeting if the start-ups did not live up to their promise. 

“The question is which of these companies is going to survive,” Das said. “And which of these founders can actually end up really being true billionaires and not just paper billionaires.” 

Most of the new AI billionaires founded their companies less than three years ago after OpenAI released ChatGPT, and then saw investors rapidly bid up the values of their firms. Mira Murati, 37, a former top executive at OpenAI, announced her AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab, only in February. By June, the startup had hit a $10 billion valuation without releasing a single product. (The startup, which declined to comment, has since released one.) 

Ilya Sutskever, 39, another former top OpenAI executive, launched Safe Superintelligence in June 2024. The company has not unveiled a product but is valued at $32 billion after raising $2 billion this year, according to PitchBook. Safe Superintelligence declined to comment. 

Brett Adcock, 39, the chief executive of Figure AI, founded the company in 2022. His net worth stands at $19.5 billion, Figure AI said. Aravind Srinivas, 31, the chief executive of Perplexity, also created his company in 2022; it is valued at about $20 billion, according to PitchBook. 

Perplexity said Srinivas was not focused on his wealth and “prefers to live modestly,” adding that the company is searching for wisdom, which “is far more important than the search for wealth.” 

The latest AI billionaires are youthful. “Like the original Gilded Age and like the dot-com boom, this AI moment is making some very young people very, very, very rich, very quickly,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who focuses on the tech economy. 

Among them are the 22-year-old founders of Mercor. Brendan Foody, the chief executive, dropped out of Georgetown University in 2023 after founding the company with two high school friends, Adarsh Hiremath, the chief technology officer, and Surya Midha, the chairman. Mercor, which declined to comment, was valued at $10 billion in an October funding round. 

Other young billionaires include Truell, the 25-year-old chief executive of Cursor, and his cofounders, Asif, Sanger and Lunnemark, who are also in their 20s. They met at MIT and graduated in 2022. A $2.3 billion funding round last month brought the valuation of their start-up — also known by its parent company’s name, Anysphere — to $27 billion, according to PitchBook.  

The AI boom has elevated mostly male founders to billionaire status, a pattern in tech cycles. Only a few women — such as Guo and Murati — have reached that wealth level.