Shruti Merchant's startup takes the hassle out of finding affordable housing in California's ritziest markets.
Title: Cofounder and CEO of HubHaus
Age: 24
As millennials continue to move in droves to expensive cities, startups are hatching creative solutions for helping them find affordable housing. HubHaus leases large homes, typically with five to 10 bedrooms, from owners and finds community-seeking renters to fill them.
Launched by Shruti Merchant and her cofounder Kerry Jones in 2016, the company has expanded to 82 properties in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. It's eyeing an expansion outside California in 2018, thanks to a recent round of $10 million in funding, according to Merchant.
Vitalik Buterin created the blockchain technology for ethereum when he was only a teenager.
Title: Founder of Ethereum
Age: 24
Vitalik Buterin first began working on ethereum when he was still a teenager. Today, the cryptocurrency built on ethereum's blockchain technology, ether, is considered one of the most influential cryptocurrencies in the world— spiking to nearly $1,500 in early 2018.
Buterin, who stepped away from venture capital earlier this year, has remained an active figure in the cryptocurrency community. In January, Buterin said that he expects 2018 to be a landmark year for ethereum: Already, the project's technology has spurred numerous blockchain applications and decentralized apps.
Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone have plans to print rockets on the planet Mars.
Title: Cofounders of Relativity Space
Age: 27, 25
Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone left their jobs as engineers at Blue Origin and SpaceX, respectively, to start their own company, Relativity Space. The pair have developed an enormous 3D printer for manufacturing rocket hardware which they hope will make it possible to build rocketships in just a few days.
In the future, Ellis and Noone hope their technology will be used to print spacecrafts on the planet Mars. Already, the pair has engineered the largest metal 3D printer in the world, which they say can currently manufacture 95% of the materials for a functioning rocket. In three years, they hope to launch a 3D printed rocket into space.
So far, the company has raised $45.1 million from investors including Mark Cuban, Social Capital, and Y Combinator.
Laura Deming wants to create an antidote for aging.
Title: Founder of The Longevity Fund
Age: 24
Laura Deming has defied the limits of age from early on. She began her college education at MIT at age 14. Two years later, she dropped out to pursue a career in developing anti-aging technology through Peter Thiel's fellowship program.
Now, the 24-year-old has founded her own $22 million venture capital fund, called Longevity Fund, in an effort to spur research efforts in the field of anti-aging.
Ryan Williams makes it easy for tech firms to hire more people of color.
Title: Cofounder and president of Jopwell
Age: 28
After Ryan Williams met his cofounder, Porter Braswell, on the trading floor of Goldman Sachs, the two quickly discovered a shared interest: mentoring other young black people. The fast friends left the finance firm in 2014 and created a job-hunting site dedicated to matching people of color (namely black, Latinx, and Native American) with great jobs and internships, particularly in tech.
Over 85 of America's leading companies, including Lyft, Pinterest, the NBA, BlackRock, and Pfizer, among others, have partnered with Jopwell to more easily connect with minorities.
Jopwell has facilitated "tens of thousands" of connections to possible employers to date.
Joseph Fasone is creating an affordable internet service provider for businesses by tapping into pre-existing fiber optic cables.
Title: Founder and CEO of Pilot
Age: 24
Joseph Fasone founded his company, Pilot, at the age of 20 with the goal of creating an internet service provider to challenge the industry standard.
By tapping into pre-existing fiber optic cables, Pilot provides its clients with internet service at a competitive price.
Today, more than 1,000 businesses use Pilot as their primary internet service provider. So far, the company has received $33.1 million in funding from investors including Union Square Ventures, Box Group, and Techstars.
Sheena Allen created a financial services app that brings banking to the unbanked.
Title: Founder and CEO of CapWay
Age: 29
Growing up in a small Mississippi town that had only one bank branch, Sheena Allen saw that much of the community made ends meet without ever having bank accounts.
In 2016, she created CapWay, an online banking and financial literacy app that aims to bring banking to those who have been kept out of the traditional banking system, including people of color and millennials living paycheck-to-paycheck.
When it launches later this year, the app will let users link existing accounts to the app and receive pre-paid debit cards from Capway. It will be packed with educational content and custom recommendations to help users increase their financial health — and create financial wealth.
Nader Al-Naji got $133 million for a cryptocurrency startup that could replace money completely.
Title: Founder and CEO of Basis
Age: 26
Nader Al-Naji first became fascinated by cryptocurrencies during a college term at Princeton, when he set up a bitcoin mining rig in his dorm room. After working as a software engineer at Google, Al-Naji decided to launch his own digital currency, called Basis.
Basis is a stable cryptocurrency: Its value is controlled by algorithms so that its worth doesn't fluctuate wildly. Al-Naji hopes that Basis will one day be used as the primary form of payment by people who don't have access to bank accounts.
In April 2018, Basis received $133 million in funding from investors including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Bain Capital Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Mathilde Collin's startup is changing the way teams get work done.
Title: Cofounder and CEO of Front
Age: 28
Built on a belief that transparency is the "great equalizer at work," Front offers a shared inbox for teams. The app integrates all messages from email to Slack to texts, and powers more than 3,000 businesses around the world to get work done faster and more easily.
Impressively, Mathilde Collin raised $66 million in a Series B round of funding led by Sequoia Capital this year, after she convinced 11 investors to hear her pitch in five days. Her company's growth metrics wowed the venture capitalists, and she received 10 offers to invest.
Jonathan Gootenberg and Omar Abudayyeh are working on improving the gene-editing tool CRISPR.
Title: PhD students at Harvard-MIT
Ages: Both 28
At Harvard Zhang Labs, Jonathan Gootenberg and Omar Abudayyeh are working on improving the gene-editing tool CRISPR. Their research has appeared in two recent publications of Science Magazine, including its February cover story.
Gootenberg's research in the field of biology has generated more than 15 patents and pending patent applications which are being used by multiple biotechnology companies today.
Delane Parnell is bringing a video gaming league to high schools across America.
Title: Founder and CEO of PlayVS
Age: 25
High schoolers across America will start playing video games for sport this fall, and they have Delane Parnll to thank. PlayVS, the online platform he's building, will let teen gamers form eSports teams at their high schools, compete with players from other schools, and battle for titles at state championships. The idea is to bring eSports in the fold of traditional high school athletics.
Raised by a single mother, Parnell grew up in the housing projects of Detroit. He said having access to school computers as a high schooler kept him off the streets and out of gangs. Now, he recently closed a $15 million round of funding to build PlayVS.
Alexandra Siegel drives diversity and inclusion within Salesforce.
Title: Manager of equality content and narrative at Salesforce
Age: 27
After spending a year in marketing at Salesforce, Alexandra Siegel used her passion for storytelling, research, and diversity issues to create a new role at Salesforce.
As the company's first-ever marketing and messaging lead in the Office of Equality, she's responsible for developing content and initiatives that drive diversity, inclusion, and social impact within Salesforce, as well as in the tech industry at large. Thanks to her office's efforts, Salesforce has spent $8.7 million to date to help close the pay gap across gender and race in the US.
Siegel is also global president of Salesforce's resource group for black employees, called BOLDforce, where she works to build, empower, and elevate the black tech community.
Dylan Field has created a cloud-based Adobe counterpart for interface design.
Title: Cofounder and CEO of Figma
Age: 26
Dylan Field is a former Thiel Fellow who has been attracting Silicon Valley attention ever since he was a teenager.
Field founded his own company, Figma, in 2012 to create a collaborative, cloud-based approach to interface design. Microsoft, Uber, and Slack are all among Figma's customers. Field's product has proved to be a hit with both designers and investors. So far, his company has raised $42.9 million from firms including Greylock and Kleiner Perkins.
Tessa Lyons is working to combat fake news at Facebook.
Title: Product manager at Facebook
Age: 28
In the social network's war on fake news, Tessa Lyons is leading the charge. She oversees the teams that work on misinformation: collaborating with engineers to fine-tune algorithms that punish fake news in the News Feed and strategizing with the team on how to stop financially motivated purveyors of fake news.
This year, she's focused on growing the number of Facebook's independent fact-checking partners in over a dozen new countries.
The Harvard grad arrived at the company in 2014 as business lead to Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook. In her spare time, Lyons serves as a board member of Care, a humanitarian organization that fights global poverty.
Patrick and John Collison are fighting back against the San Francisco housing crisis with a $1 million donation.
Titles: CEO and President of Stripe, respectively
Ages: 29, 27
The Collison brothers were fed up with the housing crisis in their adopted hometown of San Francisco. They took action in May, with their payments startup Stripe making a $1 million donation to California YIMBY, a pro-housing advocacy group.
While many of Stripe's peers in the tech industry, like Cisco, have tackled the housing crisis by working with local nonprofits and other organizations, Stripe's donation to a pro-housing advocacy group indicates that it's willing to take a stronger political stance on the housing crisis.
Before taking aim at California's housing market, the Collisons famously turned seven lines of code into a startup valued at $9.2 billion.
Allyson Dias connects young founders with financing.
Title: Director of the Thiel Fellowship
Age: 28
Some ideas can't wait. In 2011, billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel launched a program that awards $100,000 to promising young entrepreneurs who are willing to drop out of college to turn their bright ideas into real businesses.
As director of the Thiel Fellowship, Allyson Dias runs day-to-day operations, from managing external outreach and securing partnerships, to reviewing every single application and interviewing candidates. She's currently developing a still under-wraps summit for young women in early 2019.
To date, companies created by Thiel fellows are worth more than $3 billion combined (not including Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum Project, which received a grant in 2014).
Henry Hu opened what may be the world's first robot-run coffee shop.
Title: Founder and CEO of Cafe X
Age: 24
After tinkering with robotics in his undergrad, Henry Hu dropped out of college to pursue building a robot-powered café.
At Cafe X customers place orders at a kiosk, and a high-tech coffee bar fitted with a $25,000 robotic arm serves coffees, lattés, and cappuccinos — made with beans from local roasters. The robot can make up to 120 beverages an hour, depending on the complexity of the orders.
The company has three locations in San Francisco. But Hu, who started the endeavor through a Thiel Fellowship, imagines a thousand Cafe X machines in offices, airports, malls, and other commercial spaces over the next three to five years.
Josh Browder uses legal loopholes to get you cheaper flights.
Title: Founder of DoNotPay
Age: 22
Joshua Browder wants to disrupt the legal services market with chatbots. His company, DoNotPay, checks airplane flights 17,000 times a day so that users can get refunds on flights they've booked at a higher price.
Browder's flight refund service is only the beginning of how he hopes to transform the legal industry. In the future, the MIT grad wants to automate legal proceedings like political asylum and divorce filings.
"My big aim for 2018 is to save consumers a total of $25 million in unnecessary government, lawyer and administrative fees," Browder told Business Insider. "I think it’s a disgrace that lawyers are charging hundreds of dollars for copying and pasting documents. [A]ccess to justice should be about the merits of a case and not how much you can pay."Kyle Sherman's marijuana software company helped HP take the leap into legal weed.
Title: Founder and CEO of Flowhub
Age: 30
Kyle Sherman's Flowhub makes software for marijuana growers and sellers that allows them to track marijuana from "seed to sale." It collects and crunches data to ensure every leafy bud and pot product is handled in compliance with state law and federal guidelines.
Thanks to Flowhub, HP, a computer industry pioneer, became the first major tech company to produce hardware for the marijuana industry. In 2018, the enterprise giant started providing point-of-sale solutions, like registers, that come preinstalled with Flowhub's software.
The startup processes over 1 million transactions every month, according to Sherman.
Komal Ahmad connects businesses with excess food to those who need it.
Title: Founder and CEO of Copia
Age: 28
An estimated 35 million tons of food go to waste in the US every year, meanwhile, one in six people go hungry. Komal Ahmad set out to tackle the issue with Copia, a startup that sends drivers to pick up uneaten food from companies and events and delivers it to nonprofits feeding the hungry. Copia recovers nearly 80,000 pounds of food a month.
It's a win-win, according to Ahmad: The companies can write off the donation as a tax deduction and access Copia's data to figure out where it can cut back on food spending.
Since 2015, Copia has diverted more than one million pounds of food from landfills — the rough equivalent of 5.3 million pounds of CO2 remove from the atmosphere.
Matt Polega, Scott Crouch, and Florian Mayr cofounded Mark43 to make law enforcement more efficient.
Title: Cofounders of Mark43
Age: 27, 26, and 27
Scott Crouch, Matt Polega, and Florian Mayr are three Harvard classmates who started Mark43 after spending time with police officers during ridealongs for an engineering class.
The three friends realized that law officers spend unnecessary amounts of time fiddling with out-of-date technology. They decided to create a company centered on improving the software used by firefighters, police officers, 911 dispatchers, and ambulance workers to help them do their jobs more efficiently.
Since the start of 2018, Mark43's technology has been deployed across thirteen departments in the US. In March, the cofounders received $38 million from investors including General Catalyst, Bezos Expeditions, Goldman Sachs, and Spark Capital. They plan on using the money to bring Mark43's technology to countries like Canada, the UK, and New Zealand.
Sameep Tandon's self-driving car company, Drive.ai, has raised $77 million since it was founded in 2015.
Title: Cofounder and CEO of Drive.ai
Age: 27
Sameep Tandon began working on his self-driving car company Drive.ai while still a student at Stanford's AI Lab. The company is developing automated driving software to turn regular cars into autonomous vehicles.
Tandon's company is attempting to bridge the gap between the public and the self-driving car industry through collaboration with local communities. In May, Drive.ai debuted the state of Texas's first on-demand self-driving car service on public roads.
Dan Romero heads up one of the hottest cryptocurrency exchanges.
Title: Vice president and general manager of Coinbase
Age: 30
Dan Romero heads up Coinbase, one of the hottest cryptocurrency startups on the market. Currently, the company is valued at more than $1 billion.
As more and more people start trading in digital currencies, Romero has been tasked with overseeing the company's product and engineering. He's described his intentions for Coinbase as building a "Google-like company for the cryptocurrency space."
Thogori Karago connects African job seekers with opportunity at LinkedIn Africa.
Title: Head of research and development for Africa at LinkedIn
Age: 29
After spending four years as a product manager at LinkedIn, Thogori Karago catapulted to head of research and development for Africa at the social network. She's responsible for overseeing LinkedIn's growth on the African continent, in line with the company's vision to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
Having grown up in Nairobi, Kenya, she is particularly passionate about building technology products that positively impact people's lives in developing countries. This year, Karago has worked on four patent applications for LinkedIn and is currently mapping job seekers' needs and finding local solutions in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.
Jobert Abma and Michiel Prins' company, HackerOne, crowdsources hackers to ensure online security.
Title: Cofounders of HackerOne
Age: 27, 28
Jobert Abma and Michiel Prins' company, HackerOne, ensures online security through reverse methodology: The pair have developed a “bug bounty” program that invites hackers to exploit a company’s web security for profit. If a flaw in the company’s security is found, they’re paid a reward of up to $500,000.
The San Francisco-based company, which has so far received $74 million in funding, has worked with Uber, Snapchat, GM, the Air Force, and the US Department of Defense. Abma and Prins estimate that they've paid hackers more than $28 million to successfully expose security flaws online since 2012.
Reed McCord is helping to deliver meatless meat to the masses.
Title: Chief of staff at Impossible Foods
Age: 27
Five years ago, Reed McCord was the second business hire at Impossible Foods, a startup that aims to reinvent meat using plant-based ingredients. When he joined, Impossible Foods was a stealth group of mostly scientists, farmers, engineers, and chefs doing basic research on what makes meat, fish, and dairy so delicious and developing technologies to create better-tasting meatless foods.
McCord worked on everything from strategy to financial modeling to fundraising, and spent several years building the company's global supply chain from scratch.
As chief of staff, McCord's job is to make Impossible Foods' executive team as effective as possible. The company is now selling its "meat" to more than 1,000 restaurants around the US.
Brianna Stubbs is bringing research-backed science to biohacking.
Title: Lead researcher at HVMN
Age: 26
While a student athlete at the University of Oxford, Brianna Stubbs signed up for a research study on the effects of ketone esters — a drink made up of a newly discovered fourth type of fuel for humans, beyond carbs, fat, and protein. Stubbs was so in awe of its ability to increase athletic output, focus, and energy, she switched her major to physiology and joined the research lab.
In 2017, startup HVMN worked with researchers at Oxford to bring one of the world's first commercial ketone esters to market. Stubbs made yet another leap.
As head of research at HVMN, she leads research on the effects of ketone esters on cognitive performance under stress conditions, and works with top athletic and military organizations to educate them on using ketone esters as part of their performance-enhancement routine.
Ashwin Pushpala is developing a technology that could be the answer to healthy eating and peak performance.
Title: Cofounder and CEO of Sano Intelligence
Age: 29
Eating well and maintaining a healthy body weight can be challenging for many people, in part because nutrition advice changes so often. Ashwin Pushpala believes his company's device, called a continuous glucose monitor, could eventually provide an instant snapshot of how the food we eat affects our bodies — and help people make smarter decisions around their health.
The device Sano is working on attaches to the skin with an array of 400 tiny "microneedles" and measures the amount of sugar in a person's blood. It connects to a smartphone app, letting users check their blood-sugar levels anytime.
Sano recently received a $6 million paycheck from Fitbit — its first-ever investment in a startup — to complement the fitness company's new focus on healthcare.
Felipe Villamarin launched Colombia's delivery service Rappi.
Title: Cofounder of Rappi
Age: 28
Two years ago, Felipe Villamarin helped create Colombia-based courier service Rappi to deliver beer and soft drinks to thirsty customers. Now, Rappi has evolved beyond its original beverage model. Customers in 14 major Latin American cities now use the app to order on-the-go deliveries of everything from groceries to fast food to household supplies.
Since the company launched two years ago, Rappi has raised just under $200 million from firms including Andesseen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, making it one of South America's most successful new companies.
Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead have joked that their company is attempting to build the Matrix.
Title: Cofounders of Improbable
Age: 30, 27
Herman Narula and and Robert Whitehead founded Improbable to free up designers so that they can build virtual and simulated worlds more efficiently. Originally, the UK-based startup focused exclusively on building ambitious multi-player gaming environments. But today, Improbable's powerful technology is used in the fields of science, defense, and research.
The company, which is backed by blue-chip investors like Andreessen Horowitz, is well known among Britain's startup community. In May, the company took in $500 million in a Softbank-led round.
