Aexander Wang, CEO of Scale, attends an AI summit in Paris in February 2025.
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The founders of some of the world’s most successful startups have been young: Think Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom were just 19 when they launched their ventures.
But with the rise of billion-dollar artificial intelligence (AI) startups comes a new trend: their founders, on average, appear to be getting younger.
A new report released by global early-stage venture capital firm Antler, found that the age of founders of AI unicorns has fallen from a peak age of 40 in 2021 to 29-years-old in 2024. Antler analyzed 1,629 unicorns and 3,512 founders globally for this report.
However, in other industries, founder age is actually rising. In 2014, the average unicorn founder was 30 at the time of launch, compared with 34 for those who reached unicorn status between 2022 and 2024.
Several AI startups with young founders have been in the spotlight in the past year. Alexandr Wang, co-founder of $29 billion AI data labelling company Scale AI, is only 29-years-old. Wang was poached by Meta in June, in a $14.3 billion deal with the startup, to head up the tech giant’s new AI research unit called TBD Labs.
In fact, Meta’s former generative AI team, which was headed up by 65-year-old AI godfather Yann LeCun, was reorganized after its LLama4 AI model didn’t perform well.
This saw Wang become LeCun’s manager and signaled Zuckerberg’s desire to bring on a scrappier and more entrepreneurial AI lead, so that Meta could 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 of whom are currently age 22. It was recently valued at over $10 billion.
AnySphere, an AI-assisted coding and developer platform, valued at over $1 billion, is also headed up by 20-something-year-olds.
Fridtjof Berge, co-founder and chief business officer at Antler, told CNBC Make It that the key qualities in founders have shifted to being able to “move fast and break things,” and “continuously iterate and test and improve.”
Berge said: “It’s perhaps even more important now to experiment … while other things which are still important but less important now is having been in an industry for a long time or learn the playbooks for how to traditionally think about scaling a new company.”
Corporate experience ‘matters less’
Fridtjof explained that the expectations for industry experience in founders is now seen as less pivotal than being scrappy and entrepreneurial.
“I think that as I’ve been reflecting on this … the willingness and ability to experiment in the age of AI probably counts as more important than traditional corporate experience or corporate tenure,” he said.
Fridjtoff added that it “matters less” to have lots of experience in traditional company building and that it can, in fact, backfire. “You might not think with a blank-slate state,” he said.
“I think that to be technically fluent with a lot of the really emerging latest and greatest technology, it sometimes helps to be young, because that’s what you’ve learned recently in your training,” he added.
In fact, Antler’s report found that AI startups are indeed scaling two years faster than all other industries, reaching unicorn status in an average of 4.7 years. Examples of rapidly scaling AI startups in 2025 were Mistral, Lovable, and Suno AI.
And as Zuckerberg’s own example proves, executing on a wild idea in a college dorm room can lead to phenomenal success.
“He was extremely young, and definitely has adapted, adjusted, and is now scaling one of the biggest companies in the world,” Berge said.
Venture Capital firm Leonis, released its Leonis AI 100 report in November, and also found that AI startup founders were a median age of 29 at founding. Most founders are in their mid-to late-20s, often coming straight from academia or research labs rather than corporate careers.
Berge noted that while 20-somethings have qualities that allow companies to move quickly, leadership can often change hands as the firm matures.
“I guess it’s nothing new that early or young founders start companies … but it doesn’t guarantee that all of the ones creating unicorns now will be the ones leading those companies in five to 10 years,” He added.