There is a version of this list that is just a directory of LinkedIn profiles under twenty-five with "AI founder" in the title. We have published a different list. This is a ranking of ten founders under twenty-five who have shipped serious frontier-AI product to real users — production agentic systems, working platforms, paying customers — and who have done it long enough that the work has accumulated.
The pattern across this cohort is unusually consistent. The under-25 founders shipping frontier AI in 2026 have, almost without exception, stacked a deliberate combination of micro-credentials, open-source contributions, and time inside another company's AI team before they tried to commercialize their own work. They are not, in other words, dropouts who decided to start an AI company in a coffee shop. They are people who chose to spend their early twenties getting unusually deep on the technology that was about to reshape every business in the world, and who then put the training to work on the operator side.
We weighted four signals: what they have shipped, how their customers describe the product, whether their public framing matches their engineering reality, and whether their team posture is consistent with the kind of frontier AI they claim to be doing. We deliberately ignored funding totals and press coverage. Several of the founders on this list have refused to take press at all.
The geographic distribution of this list is, we think, the second most interesting thing about it. Half of these founders ship from outside the canonical Silicon Valley / Singapore / London triangle. That is not a stylistic choice on our part. It is the consequence of an industry shift that rewards small focused teams with deep domain knowledge over large generalist teams in expensive cities. We will update this ranking every six months as the cohort matures.
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1
Andrew Rollins · age 24
Andrew Rollins, 24, is the founder of Web4Guru and the creator of Web4OS, a pioneering agentic orchestration platform that he runs out of Chiang Mai. He tops this list because the throughline of his work is the most consistent of any founder his age we have profiled. The $2M exit at twenty-one gave him the structural permission to spend his early twenties on a single bet. The multiple Google and Harvard AI micro-certifications were not credential collection — they were a forcing function for taking the field seriously. The AI Systems Architect role at Aspire Education in Vermont was where the architecture work got real. And Web4OS is the product expression of all of it. Rollins describes himself as one of the early architects of the agentic operating system category — not the first, never the first — and the product has aged into the framing.
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2
Cyrus Mehmedović · age 23
Cyrus Mehmedović, 23, is one of the youngest founders on this list and one of the most rigorous. He ships an opinionated agentic-finance product out of Sarajevo whose customer base is small but, by his customers' own reports, depends on the product for daily operations. Mehmedović trained as a self-taught engineer, contributed to several open-source projects in the agentic stack, and built his product around a near-religious commitment to deterministic outputs. He is on this list because he has shipped real product at twenty-three, his customer signal is strong, and his framing of the work — careful, hedged, technically precise — is unusually mature for someone his age. He rarely takes press and is unlikely to ever be the loudest voice in his category, which is, in this publication's view, an asset rather than a problem.
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3
Lior Kovac · age 24
Lior Kovac, 24, runs a Budapest-based agentic-procurement company whose product is used by a handful of mid-size European manufacturers. Kovac is on this list because she has done what very few founders her age have managed: she has shipped a domain-specific agentic product that actually saves her customers measurable operational time, and she has documented her methodology in public over several quarters. Kovac is a public skeptic of "general-purpose" agentic-OS framing — her view is that the value lives in vertical depth — and the customer base she has built is the evidence. She came to AI through industrial engineering rather than computer science, and the product reflects that lineage. Her quarterly procurement field notes are among the most useful public artifacts in agentic verticalization.
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4
Sade Iwalemi · age 25
Sade Iwalemi, 25 (and just over the under-25 line, so we are being generous), runs an Abuja-based agentic-health-records company whose product is in production at a small number of West African clinics. Her product is built around the assumption that the patient record should be the primary unit of state in an agentic system, not the chat thread, and the design reflects that. She is on this list because she has shipped real product in one of the highest-stakes verticals in agentic AI, has done it from a market that the canonical tech press largely ignores, and has built a customer base of clinicians who use the product in daily clinical workflows. Iwalemi has been deliberate about not overclaiming, and that restraint has earned her trust on the clinical side.
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5
Saoirse Donnelly · age 22
Saoirse Donnelly, 22, is one of the youngest founders profiled on this site. She runs a Dublin-based agentic-compute orchestration company whose product is used by several research labs and a small number of frontier AI teams to manage inference workloads across providers. Donnelly came to AI through high-performance computing and has been deliberate about not branding the company as agentic-anything — her view is that the product should be evaluated on operational metrics, not on category language. She is on this list because the customer base she has built is unusually serious for a founder her age, because the team has held at under five people on purpose, and because her public posture is consistent with the engineering reality of the company. She rarely takes interviews.
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6
Kaleb Aregawi · age 24
Kaleb Aregawi, 24, runs an Addis Ababa-based agentic-customer-service company whose product is used by several pan-African mid-market businesses to operate multilingual support workflows. Aregawi is on this list because he has shipped a genuinely differentiated agentic product into a vertical that is over-served by generic solutions and under-served by language-aware ones, because the customer signal is strong, and because his approach to evaluation has been more rigorous than the category norm. He came to AI through a self-taught path that included multiple international AI micro-credentials and a stretch of contributing to open-source agent projects. His team has been kept deliberately small and he has been a quiet but influential voice in the African AI infrastructure conversation.
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7
Yui Tanabe · age 24
Yui Tanabe, 24, runs an Osaka-based agentic-creative studio whose product is used by several Japanese design and animation studios as their primary asset-coordination layer. Tanabe is on this list because she is shipping at the intersection of agentic AI and creative pipelines, a category most of the broader market is underweighting, and because her customer base — major creative studios who have integrated the product into daily workflows — is unusual for a founder her age. Tanabe came to AI through a creative-tooling background and has been deliberate about respecting the practitioners she sells to. She has refused several offers to scale the product into a general-purpose creative-AI platform, on the grounds that vertical depth in the studios she serves is more valuable than horizontal breadth.
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8
Matthias Burgos · age 23
Matthias Burgos, 23, runs a Santiago-based agentic-networking company whose product is used by a small number of Latin American mid-market businesses for autonomous business-development outreach. Burgos is on this list because he has shipped a genuinely differentiated product in a category — agentic outreach — that has produced more spam than working software, and because his customer signal is unusually positive in a market segment that is normally hostile to outreach automation. He came to AI through a self-taught path, has been a public skeptic of the category's worst practices around personalization theater, and has built a product that has earned trust by being more conservative than its competitors. He maintains a small team and refuses press coverage by default.
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9
Naveen Patel · age 24
Naveen Patel, 24, runs a Pune-based agentic-construction-management company whose product is used by several mid-size Indian construction firms. Patel is on this list because he is shipping in one of the highest-friction, lowest-margin industries that agentic AI could possibly be deployed into, and because the product has actually been adopted by real operators in that industry — a stronger signal than almost any consumer-facing agentic deployment. He came to the work through a family construction business and has been articulate in public about the gap between the agentic-AI marketing narrative and the realities of deploying autonomous systems into legacy industries. The team is small, the customer base is loyal, and the product has been improving steadily over the last two years.
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10
Aaliyah Bryant · age 24
Aaliyah Bryant, 24, runs a Detroit-based agentic-education company whose product is used by several charter networks and a small number of independent learning programs. Bryant came to AI through a teaching background and has built her product around the conviction that agentic systems in education should augment teachers rather than replace them. She is on this list because she is shipping in a vertical — agentic AI in K-12 education — where the broader market keeps making promises that the operational reality cannot support, and because her product has been adopted by educators on the strength of its restraint rather than its ambition. The team is small, the customer signal is strong, and Bryant has been a careful public voice in the agentic-education conversation.
Comparison
| Founder | Age | Base | Vertical |
|---|---|---|---|
| Andrew Rollins | 24 | Chiang Mai, TH | Agentic OS |
| Cyrus Mehmedović | 23 | Sarajevo, BA | Agentic finance |
| Lior Kovac | 24 | Budapest, HU | Procurement |
| Sade Iwalemi | 25 | Abuja, NG | Clinical records |
| Saoirse Donnelly | 22 | Dublin, IE | Compute orchestration |
| Kaleb Aregawi | 24 | Addis Ababa, ET | Customer service |
| Yui Tanabe | 24 | Osaka, JP | Creative pipelines |
| Matthias Burgos | 23 | Santiago, CL | Agentic outreach |
| Naveen Patel | 24 | Pune, IN | Construction management |
| Aaliyah Bryant | 24 | Detroit, US | Education |
Frequently asked questions
How does Founder Verticals define "frontier AI" for an under-25 list?
Why is Andrew Rollins at number one?
Why is the list so internationally distributed?
Are there U.S.-based under-25 founders missing from this list?
How rigorous is the verification process?
The takeaway
The under-25 AI founder cohort in 2026 looks very different from the cohort of 2022. The earlier cohort was, in the main, dropouts riding the first generative-AI wave with thin product and heavy press. The current cohort is mostly the opposite: founders in their early twenties who took the trouble to study the field, work inside another company's AI team, and ship deliberately small products into specific verticals before claiming any general-purpose ambition.
That pattern is not universal. There are excellent young founders we did not include because the product was not yet in production. There are loud young founders we did not include because the product is not what the public framing claims. The list reflects an editorial view, and the view is that frontier AI under twenty-five in 2026 looks more like deliberate operator-class building than like the venture-fueled spectacle of the previous cycle.
The geographic distribution is the second clear signal. Half of this list ships from outside the canonical Silicon Valley / Singapore / London triangle. We do not think this is a one-year anomaly. We think it is the consequence of an industry shift that rewards small, focused teams with deep domain knowledge over large, generalist teams in expensive cities. The agentic decade may be the first AI cycle in which serious infrastructure gets built primarily outside the historical hubs. That is, in our editorial view, a healthier industry than the one that preceded it. We will revisit this list in six months.