Brendan Foody had just finished his sophomore year at Georgetown University in 2023 when he dropped out to jump into the artificial intelligence fray in San Francisco.
Karun Kaushik dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that year to move to California after constructing an A.I. tool in his dorm room. And Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, who was traveling the world after high school, had the same idea in 2022.
Now Mr. Foody, 22, Mr. Kaushik, 21, and Mr. Carmichael-Jack, 23, are each running A.I. start-ups within a 30-minute walk of one another in San Francisco. They have raised millions of dollars for their businesses and are supervising dozens of employees. They all have a dream that their companies will make it big.
“When ChatGPT came out, it was so clear to me that this is obviously going to be a paradigm shift,” said Mr. Carmichael-Jack, the chief executive of Artisan, which makes an A.I. sales assistant and has raised more than $35 million in funding. “I knew I wanted to be involved in that.”
The entrepreneurs are part of a fast-growing cohort of chief executives in their 20s who have flocked to San Francisco’s A.I. boom.
Among others, there are also Scott Wu, 28, of Cognition AI, which makes a software coding assistant; Michael Truell, 24, of Cursor, which sells an A.I. code editor; and Roy Lee, 21, of Cluely, an A.I. software start-up. Perhaps the most prominent is Alexandr Wang, 28, who led the start-up Scale AI before Meta tapped him in June to run its new superintelligence lab.
Their growing ranks have injected a dose of youthful élan to the A.I. frenzy, which has been dominated by longtime tech giants like Google and Nvidia and decade-old start-ups like OpenAI.
Many of the entrepreneurs know one another from college or start-up incubators like Y Combinator. Work is often at the center of their lives — founders have to grind, after all — but they also host Ping-Pong nights, play poker together and meet up at networking events in the city. Venture capitalists are adding to the new blood with intensive start-up programs geared to high school and college students.
It’s part of a well-worn pattern in which droves of young hopefuls are drawn to the nation’s tech capital by a promising technology, much as 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his friends did in the mid-2000s when they showed up in Silicon Valley with Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg, now 41, famously dropped out of Harvard.
“When you have these big technology waves, the whole chessboard changes and everything is up for grabs,” said Saam Motamedi, an investor at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Greylock’s San Francisco office recently hosted four 19-year-olds who are working on a “stealth” artificial intelligence start-up, Mr. Motamedi said, though the teenagers have since moved into their own space.
Pete Koomen, a general partner at Y Combinator, said the median age of the San Francisco incubator’s most recent cohort of participants this year was 24, down from 30 in 2022.
“This is a group of largely young founders that have picked up everything and moved and gone all in on a crazy dream,” he said. “They’re all in close proximity with each other. They’re helping each other out. They’re competing with each other. It just creates this incredible energy.”
Mr. Foody runs Mercor, which provides automatic screening of résumés and A.I. job interviews. He established the company with two high school friends from San Jose, Calif., Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath. Mr. Midha, 22, is Mercor’s chief operating officer and Mr. Hiremath, 22, the chief technology officer.
In February, they raised $100 million, bringing Mercor’s total funding to more than $132 million and valuing the start-up at $2 billion. Investors include the venture capital firms General Catalyst and Benchmark.
As Mercor flourished, it hired 150 employees in San Francisco and India. The start-up is outgrowing its current space, which has a Ping-Pong table and dog cages dedicated to office pets, and is preparing to move into a bigger office nearby.
Mr. Midha said there was a sense of “extreme urgency” and “existential dread” among his peers who felt that now was the time to start an A.I. company. It “just felt crazy not to go all in” on Mercor, he added.
Mercor has already spawned other young chief executives. Rithika Kacham, 22, who dropped out of Stanford during her senior year in 2024 to join Mercor as Mr. Foody’s executive assistant, started her own company, Verita AI, in May. Her company hires professionals in various fields to help train A.I. models to recognize images more accurately, such as an intellectual property expert to help A.I. determine whether a Mickey Mouse cartoon is real.
“It’s kind of this A.I. inflection point where it felt like almost everyone I knew at Stanford was dropping out to co-found a company,” said Ms. Kacham, who was majoring in computer science and product design and is trying to raise money for Verita.
To cut through the crowd, some of the young leaders have tried to go viral. In November, Mr. Carmichael-Jack’s Artisan plastered ads across bus stops in San Francisco with the outrage-inducing directive to “stop hiring humans” and instead “hire” the start-up’s A.I. sales agent, Ava.
People were “shocked” by the marketing campaign because it tapped into fears that A.I. would replace humans, Mr. Carmichael-Jack said, but it also “made them intrigued about what we were doing.”
Mr. Kaushik, the chief executive of Delve, a start-up that automates the compliance busywork for businesses dealing with sensitive data, founded the company with his M.I.T. classmate Selin Kocalar, 21. They were part of the first class at M.I.T. to study artificial intelligence as a concentration, Mr. Kaushik said, and built an A.I. tool as a side project.
The pair had no intention of creating a company, Ms. Kocalar said, and just wanted to “make an impact and build something that people will actually use.” But after a trip to San Francisco in 2023, they dropped out of M.I.T. to build their start-up. Delve has about 20 employees and has raised $35.3 million.
Mr. Kaushik and Ms. Kocalar, now Delve’s chief operating officer, recently co-hosted an event at a table tennis hall in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood for start-up founders. Pop music blared as guests — some not old enough to order a drink from the open bar — nibbled on fried finger foods and squared off in matches swatting orange balls back and forth.
“I don’t think about age,” Ms. Kocalar said. “In today’s day and age, the barrier to entry is so low with the help of A.I.”
Soon they may be mingling with an even younger crowd.
On a recent Friday in Fort Mason, a converted military hub in the city, the venture capital firm Founders Inc. held a summer program for high schoolers and college students to nurture their start-up ideas. Long tables were covered in wires and open boxes of crackers, with some teenagers clustered together tweaking robots while others took a break to play videos games.
Among the attendees was Mizan Rupan-Tompkins, 18, a rising sophomore at San Jose State University who is studying computer science but pausing school next year to build an A.I.-powered device to help unmanned air traffic control towers land airplanes safely. His company, Stratus AI, just got an investment from Founders Inc., which he declined to detail. Founders Inc., which also declined to share the investment amount, typically writes checks of $100,000 to $250,000 for start-ups.
“Stuff moves so quickly” that he could not wait until he’d graduate in 2028 to build a company, Mr. Rupan-Tompkins said.
“It’s better to be earlier than later, just in case I missed some type of wave,” he said.
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