Ahmad Abdur Rahman Khan, a 21-year-old from Kolkata, had just finished his second year at the University of Waterloo, Canada, when he co-founded Anytool, an AI vulnerability management platform. The startup was soon selected by the famed San Francisco-based accelerator --Y Combinator (YC)-- for its winter 2026 batch, catapulting Khan into the fast-swelling ranks of twenty-somethings who are steering cool AI startups.
The average age of these newbie founders is dropping as AI models make it easier to develop applications, there is also the shrinking cost of tech development as well as the uncertain technology job market that is spurring more young people towards entrepreneurship, according to multiple investors ET spoke to.
Nitin Sharma, a partner at Antler India, a startup residency programme, said the median age of founders—backed by his fund last year --stood at 29, with the youngest cofounder being a 15-year-old. “This compares to age 35 for founders whom we funded in 2023 when the AI wave had just begun,” he said.
Another investor, Siddhartha Ahluwalia of Neon Fund, said with AI, the average founders’ age is close to 25, where it would be 35 in the SaaS era.
In November 2025, the founders of AI startup Mercor, the 22-year-old Adarsh Hiremath, and his three cofounders, were declared the world’s youngest self-made billionaireswhen their venture reached a valuation of $ 10 billion. Along the way, the young Mercor founders overtook Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s record of 20 years. Apoorva Pandhi, Zetta Venture Partners, said, “I think the average enterprise B2B founder used to be north of 35 earlier. I would say right now it is in the 20s, and the youngest that I have spoken to are even in their teens.
Other venture capital firms such as Blume Ventures and Elevation Capital have seen average age coming down to 20s, from older cohorts earlier.
Youngsters starting up is hardly new in the tech world as they are more native to the disruptive technology.
Enabling factors
However, a couple of things are changing according to Ankit Gupta, general partner at Y Combinator.
For one, coding agents are available to young people with technical acumen very early in their career, making it easy to build sophisticated applications with very little effort. “This offers an incredible advantage to people who have a lot of time and who just came of age in this AI era like those in college,” he added.
“Another reason why we are seeing a lot of young people starting up is they might feel big tech jobs are not as secure as they once were,” he said. Gupta explained that either you become a high agency person that can solve larger problems or realise that your job is not differentiated and at risk in the next few years, if not now, creating pressure.
One of the biggest challenges with younger founders has been not just building but also scaling the products and business. Pandhi, who was cited earlier, said the younger founders, who have built companies such as Cursor and Mercor, have demonstrated that they can do both.
“I think AI definitely had a change in my thought process,” Khan told ET, from San Francisco. He said that the large language models have changed what was possible and which eventually led him to Anytool, which he co-founded with two others he met at a hacker house in San Francisco.
Evaluation of startups changing
Investors are also tapping into founders at a young age, which includes teenagers, who are starting up. Y-Combinator’s latest batch has two Indian teenagers, who are running InkVell, an applied AI lab building agents for scientific research. Antler has backed a 15-year-old, who is starting an AI firm that is in stealth mode.
Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, managing partner, Upekkha, an AI accelerator platform, said that while they focus on domain expertise and looked for founders with over 10 years of experience, right now it has come down to 2-3 years.
Antler India’s Sharma also pointed out that investors are also preferring younger, hungrier AI-native founders, who are aggressive around distribution and can iterate faster. “The conventional SaaS founder archetype might not work even with more enterprise experience,” Sharma said.
Sanjay Nath, co-founder, Blume Ventures, said with the founder profiles changing, there is a need to balance between iterating faster and domain expertise. Pandhi said, “At earlier stages, the market matters but the founder is the thesis. Evaluating founders means resisting the rigid metrics and continually refining the mental models we use to recognize exceptional, non-obvious talent.”
The average age of these newbie founders is dropping as AI models make it easier to develop applications, there is also the shrinking cost of tech development as well as the uncertain technology job market that is spurring more young people towards entrepreneurship, according to multiple investors ET spoke to.
Nitin Sharma, a partner at Antler India, a startup residency programme, said the median age of founders—backed by his fund last year --stood at 29, with the youngest cofounder being a 15-year-old. “This compares to age 35 for founders whom we funded in 2023 when the AI wave had just begun,” he said.
Another investor, Siddhartha Ahluwalia of Neon Fund, said with AI, the average founders’ age is close to 25, where it would be 35 in the SaaS era.
In November 2025, the founders of AI startup Mercor, the 22-year-old Adarsh Hiremath, and his three cofounders, were declared the world’s youngest self-made billionaireswhen their venture reached a valuation of $ 10 billion. Along the way, the young Mercor founders overtook Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s record of 20 years. Apoorva Pandhi, Zetta Venture Partners, said, “I think the average enterprise B2B founder used to be north of 35 earlier. I would say right now it is in the 20s, and the youngest that I have spoken to are even in their teens.
Other venture capital firms such as Blume Ventures and Elevation Capital have seen average age coming down to 20s, from older cohorts earlier.
Youngsters starting up is hardly new in the tech world as they are more native to the disruptive technology.
Enabling factors
However, a couple of things are changing according to Ankit Gupta, general partner at Y Combinator.
For one, coding agents are available to young people with technical acumen very early in their career, making it easy to build sophisticated applications with very little effort. “This offers an incredible advantage to people who have a lot of time and who just came of age in this AI era like those in college,” he added.
“Another reason why we are seeing a lot of young people starting up is they might feel big tech jobs are not as secure as they once were,” he said. Gupta explained that either you become a high agency person that can solve larger problems or realise that your job is not differentiated and at risk in the next few years, if not now, creating pressure.
One of the biggest challenges with younger founders has been not just building but also scaling the products and business. Pandhi, who was cited earlier, said the younger founders, who have built companies such as Cursor and Mercor, have demonstrated that they can do both.
“I think AI definitely had a change in my thought process,” Khan told ET, from San Francisco. He said that the large language models have changed what was possible and which eventually led him to Anytool, which he co-founded with two others he met at a hacker house in San Francisco.
Evaluation of startups changing
Investors are also tapping into founders at a young age, which includes teenagers, who are starting up. Y-Combinator’s latest batch has two Indian teenagers, who are running InkVell, an applied AI lab building agents for scientific research. Antler has backed a 15-year-old, who is starting an AI firm that is in stealth mode.
Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, managing partner, Upekkha, an AI accelerator platform, said that while they focus on domain expertise and looked for founders with over 10 years of experience, right now it has come down to 2-3 years.
Antler India’s Sharma also pointed out that investors are also preferring younger, hungrier AI-native founders, who are aggressive around distribution and can iterate faster. “The conventional SaaS founder archetype might not work even with more enterprise experience,” Sharma said.
Sanjay Nath, co-founder, Blume Ventures, said with the founder profiles changing, there is a need to balance between iterating faster and domain expertise. Pandhi said, “At earlier stages, the market matters but the founder is the thesis. Evaluating founders means resisting the rigid metrics and continually refining the mental models we use to recognize exceptional, non-obvious talent.”