The man on the verge of becoming one of the world’s youngest AI billionaires began his entrepreneurial journey as a bored preteen living in Los Angeles.
When Ali Ansari was 12 years old and living with his family in a room at his aunt’s house in Woodland Hills, his immigrant mother told him to stop wasting time staring at his cell phone and start making money with it.
He inherited his father’s loafers and listed them on eBay for $50.
“My father said, ‘Why on earth did you sell my shoes?'” Ansari said. “My mother was very excited.”
Although it was a bad deal for his father, Ansari learned the thrill of making money. He’s been chasing it ever since.
He started riding his bike around his neighborhood, visiting garage sales and thrift stores, and buying anything he could sell online.
He continued to build his online business throughout middle school, high school, and college in California, launching an AI business in his 20s and potentially becoming a millionaire this year, his 25th year.
Ali Ansari generates training data that makes AI models like ChatGPT and Claude smarter.
(Paul Clodagh/For the Times)
His hard work as a young man has paid off more than he could have imagined. This success gave his parents the freedom to buy a house and a good car. It has been featured in the news and is now recognized by industry insiders.
But he says the main change from his previous successes is that he now has a much larger amount of work and responsibility to shoulder.
“I’m very grateful and very stressed at the same time,” he said. “That’s what it boils down to.”
Ansari’s AI company is called Micro1. In addition to training and testing, making AI smarter requires vast amounts of data. Micro1 employs and manages thousands of human experts, including programmers, lawyers, doctors, professors, and financial analysts, to collect expert information that feeds AI models such as ChatGPT. These experts review and modify the AI’s output to improve its accuracy.
Micro1 is one of the leading suppliers of this type of expert human assistance to AI, along with California competitors Scale AI, Surge, and Mercor.
Ansari said Micro1’s annual revenue has now reached $200 million, up from $4 million in 2024. Even by Silicon Valley standards, this is a staggering rise.
forbes Based on ongoing financing negotiations that value Micro1 at $2.5 billion, Ansari estimates he is on the verge of becoming a billionaire. Micro1 was last valued at $500 million.
Ansari has a booming voice, a fashionable buzz cut, and a carefully manicured beard. He’s quick with his fingers and usually responds to texts quickly, even though he’s juggling them. He has the confidence of an older person, but you can tell he’s a Gen Zer because he uses the word “like” a lot in conversation.
His startup is based in Palo Alto, and during his monthly trips to Los Angeles, he works out of a coworking space in Woodland Hills, minutes from his family, high school, and memories of his teenage side hustle.
Ali Ansari is the co-founder of Micro1, a company that hires and manages thousands of human experts to help train AI.
(Paul Clodagh/For the Times)
“This area is my whole childhood,” he said, gesturing out the window from his Woodland Hills office during an interview at his co-working space.
Ansari’s family immigrated to the United States when he was 10 years old after winning the rare U.S. green card lottery. Before emigrating, they lived a comfortable life in a small seaside town in northern Iran. There his father ran a cupboard factory.
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has experienced several middle-class exodus as Iranian immigrants migrate to the United States to escape economic collapse and persecution. The growing presence of the Persian diaspora in Westwood earned it the nickname Westwood. tehran jerez.
The family of four has been sharing a room at a relative’s house for the first year. His mother got a job at Target. The transition was difficult for Ansari, who was not fluent in English and often got in trouble for his antics at school.
“Teachers call my mom and say things like, ‘Your son is making the cow noise again,'” he says.
When I was 14, I started reselling textbooks because they were easy to carry in my backpack. He developed it because he realized that it was difficult to procure a steady supply of books through garage sales. cash book nowa website for college students to sell textbooks. He would list them on Amazon at a 50% markup.
Buying and selling textbooks became his obsession. His bedroom wall was divided into two sections to track inventory: “Unlisted” and “Listed.” By the age of 16, Ansari had sold more than $100,000 in books.
“I would rather focus on this method than on school,” he said. “It was like the main hustle.”
I started a tutoring business when I was in high school and later sold it. In 2019, Ansari enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and started a software agency building websites for small and medium-sized businesses.
Hiring engineers to build our website was taking too long, so we built an AI screening tool to help with interviews. This later became Micro1, and his screening tools were used to track, eliminate, and test all kinds of experts for training AI.
Still, the road to success was not without its bumps. After raising $2 million in 2023, Ansari suffered a panic attack during a trip to visit the Indian team.
“I kept repeating this thought in my head, and it was like some guy decided to give me millions of dollars,” he said. “And now I have an obligation to do something really good with it.”
With the help of his family and reading, he overcame this situation and has now grown to the point where he can control his anxiety and act with confidence.
“I’m more calm than I’ve ever been and frankly I’m less anxious than I’ve ever been,” he said.
Micro1’s annual revenue surged more than 30 times to $150 million last year. By early 2026, it had surpassed $200 million.
The company is building a global workforce of contractors with a variety of skills, from programmers and comedians to doctors and lawyers, who teach their skills to AI.
Ansari said leading such a fast-growing company in the heart of one of the hottest technology sectors feels like a constant battle to “fight back” against competitors trying to meet demand, raise capital and poach employees.
He says he has no hobbies other than work. He doesn’t watch TV or movies, but he devours business podcasts and personal stories from entrepreneurs like Elon Musk.
Ansari is still adjusting to his newfound fame and responsibility. As the company’s valuation increased, Ansari bought his family a home in Woodland Hills. He recently hired a chief of staff to help him with family and work matters.
“I’m always choosing what to spend my time on, and that has become the most difficult thing,” he said.
Ansari believes that future growth will increase the demand for human training data. He recently expanded Micro1 into robotics, recruiting about 1,000 people from 60 countries to record footage of themselves doing household chores. This footage will be used to train the robot system.
Ansari predicts that human data will become the most important data in the long run. 1 trillion dollar market — This prediction is based on the assumption that approximately 5% of the total human workforce will eventually be devoted to training AI systems.
During a recent trip home, his father told him he should diversify into robots. When Ansari told him that Micro1 had already started doing that, his father complained.
The man who started an empire in loafers now wanted a piece of the action.
“You stole my idea,” his father said. “You have to give me the stock.”
The young Ansari hopes his success will uplift not only his family but many others.
“I might [become] “I’m the youngest Persian billionaire in the world. I think I’m an inspiration to many other Iranians, but it feels a little strange to say this,” he said.
