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.
“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.
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.
“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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
