AI boom: 5 youngest billionaires who built their fortunes on Artificial Intelligence

Anthropic IPO has hogged all the limelight as the Claude maker's seven cofounders are each worth about USD 14 billion before the initial public offering. However, AI has made plenty of other founders rich too, some of them barely out of college, according to a November 2026 report on AI billionaires.

Surya Midha is just 22 and already holds a USD 2.2 billion stake in Mercor, the startup he launched in 2023 with his partners. Four engineers in their mid-20s started the AI code editor Cursor in 2022, and each is now worth USD 1.3 billion. 27-year-old Fabian Hedin holds USD 1.6 billion thanks to Lovable, a platform that lets people build software by prompting AI, MobiusPay study shows.

The MobiusPay research looked at Forbes’ 2026 list of billionaires to find the youngest founders who built their fortunes on AI companies.


1. Surya Midha is the youngest self-made AI billionaire at 22, with a stake in Mercor worth USD 2.2 billion. The company started as an AI recruiting platform and has since become a marketplace that connects AI labs with vetted experts who help train and test their models. Demand from those labs sent revenue climbing fast, which pushed a startup this young past the billion-dollar mark. Midha holds roughly the same share as his two cofounders, and Forbes counts the trio as the youngest self-made billionaires in its history.

2. Brendan Foody comes second at 23, sharing the spot with his Mercor cofounder Adarsh Hiremath. His USD 2.2 billion stake is bigger than most other founders on the list, apart from Alexandr Wang. He is also 11 years younger than Chris Olah, the youngest of Anthropic’s seven cofounders at 34. Foody launched Mercor in 2023, so a fortune of this size came together in roughly three years.

3. Adarsh Hiremath is another AI billionaire at 23, and his USD 2.2 billion matches Foody’s and Midha’s exactly. Forbes puts the three cofounders’ stakes at roughly equal, so no one at the company got a head start on the others. His fortune is $900M larger than what each of the four Cursor founders holds, even though Mercor is only a year older than Cursor’s editor.

4. Arvid Lunnemark is the first Swedish name on the list, tied for fourth at 25, with USD 1.3 billion to his name. He cofounded the AI code editor Cursor in 2022 with fellow MIT-trained engineers. The product caught on fast with programmers, and it became one of the fastest-growing AI coding assistants around. Private investors have since valued the company in the tens of billions, which is where Lunnemark’s stake comes from.

5. Sualeh Asif shares the spot with Lunnemark, also at 25 and worth USD 1.3 billion. He is one of four cofounders behind Cursor, and Forbes credits each of them with the same stake. The editor is built around AI from the ground up, so it suggests and writes code for developers as they work. That approach helped the team grow a young company quickly, and together, the four founders now hold USD 5.2 billion.