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Teens are launching artificial intelligence companies — and making big money

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:46:57 +0000

Most 15-year-olds worry about things like an upcoming math test or whether their crush likes them back.

But a growing number of teenagers are using artificial intelligence to launch innovative tech companies, stressing about raising venture capital and product launches — not who they’ll take to prom.

While teen tech founders are nothing new — Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he launched Facebook and Bill Gates was 19 when he founded Microsoft — they’re getting younger and more prevalent thanks to the AI boom.

Mark Zuckerberg famously launched Facebook as a 19-year-old college kid. Corbis via Getty Images

“What was really just a once in a blue moon sort of thing happening all of a sudden is becoming very common,” Kevin Hartz, a San Francisco-based tech insider who mentors teen founders through the startup program Z Fellows, told The Post.

“It feels very Americana, like that kind of entrepreneurial spirit is still alive and extremely well in the United States,” added Hartz, who is also the founder of the ticketing platform Eventbrite.

Silicon Valley is adapting to the shift. Last fall, Y Combinator — the buzzy startup accelerator and VC firm — launched an early decision program encouraging founders to apply for its accelerator program while they’re still in college. Z Fellows has no age requirement and openly supports founders who drop out of high school or college to build tech companies.

Bill Gates was also just 19 when he started Microsoft. Corbis via Getty Images

Not long ago, parents might have been more skeptical. But today, starting a company at a young age is increasingly seen as a viable career path.

“They can do almost anything, and they’re really a driving force behind this AI economy today,” Hartz said. “It’s really extraordinary.”

Have a look at some of the AI kids.

Pranjali Awasthi, 19

At just 19, Awasthi has already founded two AI startups. She launched her first company, Delv AI, an AI-powered research platform that summarizes and analyzes documents, when she was a 14-year-old high school student in Florida. “I’ve kind of just got desensitized to the, ‘Oh my God, you’re so young,’ ” Awasthi told The Post.

After graduating high school early at age 16, she spent one semester at Georgia Tech before dropping out and moving to San Francisco.

Pranjali Awasthi (center, with her co-founders) is already on her second startup, an email assistant called Slashy.

“If you’re a high agency ambitious person, and there’s so much going on with AI, it just makes sense,” she explained.

Now, she’s building her second company, Slashy, an AI email assistant for founders that’s backed by Y Combinator.

She and her cofounders — 21-year-old Harsha Gaddipati and 20-year-old Dhruv Roongta — aren’t just building a business together. They also live together.

“It helps us bond as we go through this process,” she said.

Zach Yadegari, 18

Less than a year ago, the Long Island native was rejected by 15 top universities, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Princeton — despite having a 4.0 GPA, stellar test scores and a startup that was bringing in tens of thousands of dollars each month.

No worries. That startup — a calorie-counting and weight-tracking app called Cal AI that he co-founded with Henry Langmack, 18, Blake Anderson, 25, and Jake Castillo, 30 — has been downloaded more than 8 million times and is now on track to bring in $30 million a year.

Long Island native Zach Yadegari was rejected by 15 top colleges — but no matter, his company is on track to rake in $30 million this year. Zach Yadegari / Instagram

Yadegari, who came up with the idea for the app after being frustrated by what was out there when he was trying to bulk up a a few years back, ended up enrolling at the University of Miami for the social experience. He’s just like a normal college kid — save for the slate gray Lamborghini he bought with the money he made from Cal AI.

The young founder started coding at seven years old, and by 16, he had created a gaming website and sold it for six figures. He says he’s never felt limited by his age.

Yadegari’s success enabled him to buy a gray Lamborghini. Zach Yadegari / Instagram

“I think that entrepreneurship is really cool because at the end of the day, age doesn’t really matter much,” Yadegari told CNBC last year. “You’re either good or not good at what you do, and then the market will decide [the] results.”

Siddarth Nandyala, 15

In 2024, the Frisco, Texas-based teen founded Circadian AI, a smartphone app designed to detect early signs of heart disease in seconds by holding the phone close to the patient’s chest, where it records the heartbeat and uses cloud-based machine learning to analyze the sounds.

Nandyala hopes the app can be used as a pre-screening tool in rural areas with limited resources, helping healthcare professionals identify at-risk patients and refer them to specialists.

“It can be provided to trained professionals or nurses or healthcare providers in these resource-constrained environments, where they’d be able to use these tools and use this to be able to understand whether a patient has a potential cardiovascular abnormality,” he explained.

At 15, tech entrepreneur Siddarth Nandyala is the youngest student ever to enroll at the University of Texas at Dallas. Courtesy of Siddarth Nandyala

Defying the stereotype of the college dropout tech founder, Nandyala is in his second semester at the University of Texas at Dallas — as the youngest student ever enrolled there. Due to his age, he still lives at home instead of in the dorms, but he says college has already been a pivotal experience.

“It’s taught me so much in terms of prioritizing — both a social and a developmental perspective,” he said. It’s really shaped me as a person.”

Sunkalp Chandra, 18

As Sunkalp Chandra finishes his senior year at High Technology HS in Lincroft, NJ, some of his teachers are surprised to learn he’s running a tech company.

“Running an AI startup isn’t exactly a typical after school activity,” he told The Post.

Chandra focuses on classes and homework during the day. In the early mornings, evenings, and weekends, he works on building Reteena, an AI health tech startup that builds tools to make Alzheimer’s diagnosis and therapy more effective and accessible.

Chandra and his cofounders are currently focusing on their flagship product, Remembrance, which they launched last year. He describes it as an AI-powered reminiscence therapy tool that engages users in gentle conversations to trigger personal memories. The team plans to start raising venture capital once he’s in college.

High school senior Sunkalp Chandra plans to start raising VC for his AI health startup in college. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Chandra met his cofounders, Alex Yang and Jainish Patel, through online Discord communities and they connected over ther shared mutual interests in technology and Alzheimer’s. They’ve still never met in person, and the team is scattered across the globe: Yang is based in Seoul, South Korea, and Patel is based in Florida.

“We wanted to use modern AI to help people maintain their dignity, memory, and identity as they age, especially in the face of cognitive decline,” Chandra told The Post.

Some in the healthcare field have been skeptical of a startup by teenagers, but Chandra doesn’t take it personally.

“We focus on showing our preparation, our research,” he said. “Once people saw the rigor behind what we’re building, the conversation shifted from doubt to more curiosity and support.”

Aayam Bansal, 18, and Ishaan Gangwani, 18

The San Francisco-based pair has raised $1.5 million — including a recent $500,000 from Y Combinator — for their startup Synthetic Sciences, an AI assistant for researchers that helps with everything from reviewing studies to doing experiments.

Aayam Bansal (left) and Ishaan Gangwani have raised $1.5 million for their Synthetic Sciences startup. Courtesy of Aayam Bansal

For Bansal, committing to Synthetic Sciences full-time meant dropping out of college at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in his first semester.

“The pain point was so real and what I was doing at Synthetic Sciences felt like a rare window where working on it full-time would be uniquely high-leverage,” he said. “College will always be there; this opportunity likely wouldn’t.”

Even without school, running a startup as a teen is quite a lot.

“In a single day I might be talking to investors, dealing with legal or compliance issues, handling operations, shipping product, debugging code, talking to users and thinking about marketing — and none of those can really be dropped. The constant context-switching is exhausting,” he said. “At this age, you’re learning all of it in real time, which is intense, but it also forces you to level up very quickly.”

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» Guess which top college is launching a “creator economy” program?

admin — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 15:58:05 +0000

I’ll give you a hint. They bleed orange and blue and Dinosaur B-B-Q.

Last week, Syracuse University announced the launch of a new Center for the Creator Economy. The first academic hub of its kind on a U.S. college campus, this spanking new third space—fourth space? Fifth space?!—will “offer courses, [and] research and industry partnerships to prepare students for careers in digital content and entrepreneurship.” In other words? Get in, influencers. We’re going to college.

This isn’t your older sister’s Twitch, by the way. (Or, Reels? Vines?!) The bespoke center is aimed at a new class of professionally minded content creators, “from podcasters and streamers to influencers and digital artists.”

In their announcement, Syracuse cited a Goldman Sachs appraisal that has the creator economy approaching $500 billion by 2027. As one of very few American sectors on the uptick, it makes sense to jump on the heat. But questions remain.

A PEW report cited in the university’s press release suggests that most digital natives are already fluent in internet. (Two in five U.S. teenagers already earn income through digital channels.) So what can an influencer get out of a college degree? Especially if she’s been doing just dandy on her own?

As Francesca Aton at ARTNews reported Thursday, one answer is a blue check for the mind. Undergraduate and graduate classes in “creative content, audience engagement, and digital strategy” ought to help young entrepreneurs optimize their platforms.

There’s also the power of IRL networking. The center will host on-campus incubators, and provide avenues for mentorship—perhaps bringing the likes of Nara Smith into closer contact with her acolytes.

But the new program comes on the heels of some unsatisfying news for old fashioned students. Last week, Syracuse decided to halt admissions for 20 majors for the next academic year while the pertinent programs undergo an internal academic review.

Deans were instructed to review disputed majors given “nine-year enrollment data and financial metrics.” This task, and the stop work order itself, came down from Syracuse’s senate, where faculty input was not solicited.

On the chopping block are many humanities majors—like French, German, Italian, Russian, Classics, African American Literature, Latin-Latino American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Modern Jewish Studies, and Religion. Even a few you may have thought safe (Statistics, Chemistry, and Applied Math) are in the line of fire. And, of course, Fine Arts.

Students will still be able to take classes in these subjects while the major pause is in effect. But it’s hard not to see a pattern here. Today’s Latin lovers may fare better if they frame their esoteric interests as a podcast.

I don’t mean to pick on old Otto the Orange. Syracuse is hardly the only college to be openly panicking as they reconsidering their place in the culture. American universities themselves feel on a chopping block. Authoritarian pressure is mounting on colleges, big and small. And as sticker prices tick up, enrollment at many private liberal arts colleges is on the sharp decline.

It’s hard to picture how higher education will look in America in twenty years, that’s for sure. But I’ve got one guess. The future will be digital.

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Solange Knowles is launching a free radical library. ‹

admin — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 17:44:44 +0000

September 26, 2025, 2:55pm

Once again, Solange Knowles is using her popularity for a good cause. Last night on Instagram, the polymath poet, culture worker, and song stylist announced a new literary project.

An archive sponsored by Saint Heron, Knowles’ “multidisciplinary institution reverencing the spiritual act of creation,” will house and lend a rare collection of Black and Brown intellectual, literary, and art works. Knowles is the founder and creative director behind the Saint Heron Community Library.

Per its charter, the library is a new “literary center dedicated to students, artists, creatives and general book/literature enthusiasts” interested in the often underserved corridors of the archive.

Based on a 2021 collaboration with Rosa Duffy, founder of Atlanta’s For Keeps Bookstore, the library aims to be an open educational resource. States-based readers can follow Solange’s Insta stories for registration details. And, when the portal’s up and running, borrow works for 45 days, for free.

A glance at the archive reveals a dazzle of rare resources that one would usually need the Schomburg’s help to track down. Saint Heron’s packing poetry, art catalogues, histories, monographs, and anthologies. One could request Ntozake Shange’s A Daughter’s Geography, or a rare bundle of June Jordan essays.

Out-of-print, rare, and first-edition titles make up the bulk of the collection. So works by Wanda Coleman, Pope L., and Ruby Dee sit next to titles by Octavia Butler and Audre Lorde.

The physical book borrowing system will be honor based. Each borrower may reserve one book per person, with requests fulfilled on a first-come, first-served basis. Shipping will be complimentary, but if your book isn’t in by the deadline, a credit card will be charged on file. But details to come on this logistics front.

In the meantime, hooray for the archive! Have you thanked a Knowles sister today?

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