Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale, will attend the AI Summit in Paris in February 2025.
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The world’s most successful startups are founded by young people. Think Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. They were both just 19 years old when they started their venture.
But the rise of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence (AI) startups is creating a new trend. Its founders seem to be getting younger on average.
A new report released by global early-stage venture capital firm Antler finds that the age of AI unicorn founders has fallen from a peak of 40 in 2021 to 29 in 2024. Antler analyzed 1,629 unicorns and 3,512 founders from around the world for this report.
But in other industries, the age of founders is actually increasing. In 2014, the average unicorn founder was 30 years old at startup, while founders who reached unicorn status between 2022 and 2024 were 34 years old.
Over the past year, several AI startups with young founders have gained attention. Alexandr Wang, co-founder of $29 billion AI data labeling company Scale AI, is only 29 years old. Wang was poached by Meta in a $14.3 billion deal in June to head the tech giant’s new AI research division, called TBD Labs.
In fact, Meta’s original generative AI team, led by 65-year-old AI godfather Yann LeCun, was reorganized due to poor performance of the LLama4 AI model.
This makes Wang manager of LeCun and signals Zuckerberg’s desire to bring in a smarter, more entrepreneurial AI leader to help Meta move faster in the AI space.
Meanwhile, Mercor, an AI-powered talent and recruitment platform, was also co-founded by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha. All three are now 22 years old. Recent valuations exceed $10 billion.
AnySphere, an AI-assisted coding and developer platform, is valued at over $1 billion and is also led by a 20-something.
Fridtjof Berge, co-founder and chief business officer of Antler, told CNBC Make It that the key qualities for founders have shifted to being able to “move fast and break things” and be able to “continually iterate, test and improve.”
Berge said, “Experimenting is probably even more important now…while other things that are still important but are less important now are learning strategies about being in the industry longer or traditional thinking for scaling a new company.”
Corporate experience is “not that important”
Fridtjof explained that expectations for founders to have industry experience are now less important than being fastidious and entrepreneurial.
“When we think about this, we think that in the age of AI, the willingness and ability to experiment is probably more important than traditional corporate experience or tenure,” he said.
Frizhitov added that having a lot of experience in traditional company formation is “not very important” but can actually be counterproductive. “You might not be able to think about it with a blank slate,” he says.
“I think sometimes being young helps to be technically fluent with a lot of the latest and greatest technologies that are really emerging, because that’s something I learned recently in training,” he added.
In fact, according to Antler’s report, AI startups are scaling two years faster than all other industries, reaching unicorn status in an average of 4.7 years. Examples of AI startups that will scale rapidly in 2025 include Mistral, Lovable, and Suno AI.
And as Zuckerberg’s own example proves, implementing wild ideas in your college dorm room can lead to incredible success.
“Even though he was very young, he definitely adapted and adapted and is now scaling one of the largest companies in the world,” Berge said.
Venture capital firm Leonis released its Leonis AI 100 report in November, which also found that the average age of AI startup founders at start-up was 29 years old. Most founders are in their mid-to-late 20s and often come from academia or research rather than corporate careers.
Burge noted that while people in their 20s have the qualities that allow companies to move quickly, leaders often change as companies mature.
“There’s probably nothing new about early or young founders starting companies, but not everyone who creates unicorns today will be leading them five to 10 years from now,” he added.
