With more than $1.5 billion raised, this year’s Under 30 listmakers are all in on the AI boom.
By Rashi Shrivastava, Zoya Hasan and Nicole McElroy
is growing up — and so are the entrepreneurs who are driving the white-hot industry. As investments flow in by the trillions, in 2025, it seems every company, big or small, wants to become an AI company. The opportunities are plenty, but new startup founders must find innovative ways to integrate the technology into applications and prove themselves in a fiercely competitive — and frothy — market.
The 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 AI cohort is an elite collection of young visionaries building machine learning, attracting customers and investors in droves. Jesse Zhang, 28, is CEO and cofounder of Decagon, which makes AI agents for customer service tasks. He’s a new entrant in a historically crowded market. But Zhang has managed to snag reputed customers like Duolingo, Hertz and ClassPass and raise about $255 million from big-name backers including Andreessen Horowitz and Accel.
Other young entrepreneurs are building fast-growing startups in sleepy industries like legal, accounting and insurance. Take, Max Junestrand, 26, the cofounder and CEO of Legora (valuation $1.8 billion), who started the legal tech company two years ago and now touts 300 law firms as customers of its AI software that handles gruntwork like document reviews and drafting for lawyers. Stanford dropouts David Yue and Finsam Samson (both 24) are building an AI-powered tool to help accountants keep up with global regulations. (They’re also training the next generation of tax pros how to adopt AI in their jobs.) Alejandrina Gonzalez Reyes, 28, is building an AI receptionist for insurance agencies.
Moonlake AI cofounders Sharon Lee, 25 and Fan-Yun Sun, 28 are developing an AI platform that automatically generates interactive 3D worlds. The idea is that the tool will organically be used by people for gaming, animation, filmmaking or even for education, which in turn would create simulation data used to train AI models.
The 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 finalists were chosen from hundreds of nominations and online submissions from a variety of sources like venture capital firms, universities and startup accelerators, as well as months of reporting conducted by list editors. Candidates were then evaluated by a panel of expert judges featuring May Habib, cofounder and CEO of AI enterprise startup Writer; Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of enterprise search startup Glean; Olivia Moore, a partner who leads consumer AI investing at Andreessen Horowitz; and Grace Isford, an Under 30 alumni and partner at tech-focused investment firm Lux Capital.
The Under 30 AI category was established last year to highlight the talented young entrepreneurs and researchers shaping this new wave. Since then, it’s been the most funded category on the list — bringing in nearly $1.5 billion this year. To be considered, all candidates had to be under the age of 30 as of December 31, 2025 and never before named to an 30 Under 30 North America, Asia or Europe list.
These are just some of the impressive listmakers bringing machines to life. Of this year’s class, 25% are women, 57% identify as people of color and 97% are founders or cofounders. Meet the rest of the members of the AI list here, plus all of the other 30 Under 30 2026 categories here.
The 2026 Under 30 AI list was edited by Zoya Hasan, Rashi Shrivastava and Nicole McElroy.
