AI boom mints 9 of record 13 self-made billionaires under 30

Three others entered the billionaire club by building prediction-market platforms, another field that barely existed a decade ago, according to Forbes.

They are 29-year-old Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour, co-founders of Kalshi, and 27-year-old Shayne Coplan, founder of Polymarket. Lopes Lara is also the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire.

The other young entrepreneur, Ed Craven, co-founded Stake.com, an online casino.

Together, these self-made billionaires under 30, with the youngest being 22, have a combined net worth of about US$23 billion.

Below are the nine young entrepreneurs and their AI firms.

AI recruiting firm Mercor

Mercor's founders (left to right): Adarsh Hiremath, Brendan Foody and Surya Midha. Photo from Mercor's Instagram

Mercor, a recruiting startup that helps supply talent to some of Silicon Valley’s top AI labs, turned its three co-founders, all aged 22, into the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. They are also the youngest-ever self-made tech billionaires, surpassing Mark Zuckerberg who reached that milestone at 23.

Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha started the firm in 2023 to link engineers in India with U.S. firms looking for freelance coders. Candidates are interviewed with AI avatars before getting matched with employers.

The trio are all children of software engineers who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, met through elementary and high school debates, and dropped out of college to pursue their business venture.

They became billionaires after the startup was valued at $10 billion in a funding round last October, as reported by The New York Times.

Midha is currently the firm’s chairman while Foody serves as CEO and Hiremath as CTO. They each hold a 22% stake worth $2.2 billion in the company.

AI coding tool Cursor

Cursor’s cofounders (left to right): Aman Sanger, Arvid Lunnemark, Sualeh Asif and Michael Truell. Photo from X

The next group of billionaires consists of the four Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni behind Cursor, an AI-powered coding tool used by millions of software developers including those at Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal.

The tool is the only product of Anysphere, which was launched in 2022 by Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark. The quartet had earlier met at and graduated from MIT.

Cursor has benefited from the rise of so-called "vibe-coding," or AI coding, which involves developing software by describing ideas or instructions to AI rather than manually writing code.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called Cursor his "favorite enterprise AI service" in an interview with CNBC last October, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last June that he used it to help vibe-code a webpage.

Truell, Sanger and Asif are 25 while Lunnemark is 26. Each holds roughly a 4.5% stake valued at $1.3 billion in the startup.

AI website builder Lovable

Lovable's founders Fabian Hedin (L) and Anton Osika. Photo from Instagram

Fabian Hedin, 26, is worth about $1.6 billion, largely due to his roughly 24% stake in Lovable, another vibe-coding tool. He is also one of Europe’s youngest self-made billionaires.

Lovable was co-founded in 2023 by Hedin and Anton Osika, 35. It allows users to create websites and applications through written prompts.

It set a record as the fastest-growing software startup ever last July with a subscription revenue of $100 million. Four months later, its active user base had surged from 2.3 million to eight million.

Lovable was most recently valued at $6.6 billion in a funding round last month.

Data labeler Scale AI

Alexandr Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, in Paris, France, Feb. 10, 2025. Photo by Reuters

Alexandr Wang, 28, launched data labeling firm Scale AI in 2016 alongside Lucy Guo, now 31.

The company hires contract workers to carry out a wide range of tasks, from summarizing news and writing haikus to producing stories in languages such as Xhosa and Urdu, to supply chatbots with the detailed linguistic context they need to operate effectively. Data labeling is a crucial process for training AI systems to understand and interpret human language.

Wang later parted ways with Guo, who left Scale in 2018 following a falling out between the two. He stayed on as chief executive until June, when Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale for about $14 billion and recruited Wang as its chief AI officer.

He first became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire in 2022 and regained the title in May 2024 before losing it to Polymarket’s Coplan last October.

While no longer the youngest, he is the richest among the 13 self-made billionaires under 30 with a net worth of $3.2 billion.