The founders and teams fueling the AI boom are quite different from the software-era startups of yesteryear, and are generally younger.
AI founders are five years younger on median age, more technology-oriented than business-oriented, and typically have no prior experience working together, according to a new report from Leonis Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that studied 100 fastest-growing AI startups using in-house AI research tools and public data.
The unicorn club of the 2010s included Airbnb, Box, and LinkedIn, and these companies were increasingly led by product managers and MBAs.
Today, AI founders are more likely to be PhDs with research backgrounds or math Olympiad medalists, coming together to make technological breakthroughs.
That’s because “in AI, the technology is the product,” said Leonis partner and former OpenAI researcher Jenny Hsiao. “In previous generations, technology was about enabling something else,” Hsiao added, pointing to examples like Airbnb’s short-term rentals and Uber’s car marketplace.
Their median age is 29 years old, up from 34 in the 2010s, but the most common founding age is 26 or 27. For example, Cursor’s founders were in their early 20s out of MIT when they founded the company, while CEO Aravind Srinivas was 28 when he co-founded Perplexity. The co-founders of AI legal tech startup Harvey were also in their late 20s.
Even when founders are younger, the college dropout myth can be an outlier. And popularity is also important. According to the report, more than 60% of top AI founders graduated from elite educational institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Harvard University.
The team below the leader is also evolving. They are smaller and less hierarchical, with CEOs involved in managing multiple levels. Hsiao attributes this to the replacement of jobs by AI and widespread efficiency drives that are eliminating middle managers across Silicon Valley.
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According to the report, AI startups typically pivot quickly and grow revenue faster as their model capabilities evolve.
For example, AI coding tool Cursor reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue within a year, Leonis said. This is a feat that Slack accomplished in three tries. The company attributes this to AI’s ability to replace long hours of skilled labor and founders’ actions to generate revenue faster.
Finally, the report looked at the VC firms supporting the AI boom. At pre-seed and seed stages, Y Combinator leads the pack by a wide margin, backing more than 20% of the 100 fastest-growing AI startups.
But while Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia dominate Series A and B rounds, they are “aggressively moving upstream,” or participating in earlier stage rounds, Leonis said.
