AI matures while some of its pioneers have not yet

AI Boom Lowers the Age of Startup Founders as Young Entrepreneurs Take the Lead

Ahmad Abdur Rahman Khan was just 21 years old and finishing his second year at the University of Waterloo, Canada, when he co-founded Anytool, an AI vulnerability management platform. Soon after its launch, the startup was selected for Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 batch, placing Khan among a growing cohort of twenty-something—and even teenage—founders building cutting-edge AI companies.

According to investors, the average age of startup founders is steadily falling, driven by advances in artificial intelligence, lower costs of technology development and growing uncertainty in the traditional tech job market.

“The median age of founders backed by us last year was 29, with the youngest cofounder being just 15 years old,” said Nitin Sharma, partner at Antler India. “This compares with an average age of 35 for founders we funded in 2023, when the AI wave had just begun.”

Similarly, Siddhartha Ahluwalia of Neon Fund said the average founder age in the AI era has dropped to around 25, compared with 35 during the SaaS boom.

The trend gained global attention in November 2025, when Mercor, an AI startup founded by 22-year-old Adarsh Hiremath and three cofounders, reached a valuation of $10 billion, making them the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. In the process, they surpassed the record previously held by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

“I think the average enterprise B2B founder used to be north of 35. Today, it’s firmly in the 20s, and some are even teenagers,” said Apoorva Pandhi of Zetta Venture Partners. Venture firms such as Blume Ventures and Elevation Capital have also observed a similar shift.

Enabling Factors

While young founders have long been a feature of the tech world, investors say AI has changed the game.

“Coding agents are now available very early in a developer’s career, making it easier to build sophisticated products with minimal effort,” said Ankit Gupta, general partner at Y Combinator. “This gives a huge advantage to people who’ve just come of age in the AI era, especially college students.”

Gupta added that job insecurity in big tech is another major factor pushing young talent toward entrepreneurship. “Either you become a high-agency person who solves big problems, or you risk becoming irrelevant in the next few years,” he said.

One concern investors had earlier was whether young founders could scale as well as build products. However, companies such as Mercor and Cursor have shown that age is no longer a barrier.

“I think AI changed my entire thought process,” Khan told ET from San Francisco. “Large language models expanded what was possible, and that eventually led to Anytool.” He co-founded the startup with two others he met at a hacker house in San Francisco.

Changing Evaluation Metrics

Investor evaluation frameworks are also evolving. Y Combinator’s latest batch includes two Indian teenagers, founders of InkVell, an applied AI lab building agents for scientific research. Antler has backed a 15-year-old founder working on an AI startup currently in stealth.

“At Upekkha, we once looked for founders with over 10 years of domain experience. Now we’re comfortable with 2–3 years,” said Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, managing partner at the AI-focused accelerator.

Sharma of Antler India noted that investors increasingly prefer AI-native, younger founders who can iterate quickly and move aggressively on distribution. “The conventional SaaS founder archetype may no longer work,” he said.

However, Sanjay Nath, co-founder of Blume Ventures, cautioned that speed must be balanced with domain understanding.

“At the earliest stages, the market matters—but the founder is the real thesis,” Pandhi said. “Recognising exceptional, non-obvious talent requires rethinking rigid metrics and continuously refining how we evaluate founders.”

As AI continues to lower entry barriers, the startup ecosystem is witnessing a generational shift—one where age is no longer a constraint, and ambition, adaptability and AI fluency are becoming the defining traits of the next wave of entrepreneurs.