These Teenagers Are Already Running Their Own AI Companies

They might not yet drive, but they’re getting an early start in business by leveraging vibe-coding and social media.

Like any good tech founder, Nick Dobroshinsky puts in late nights and early mornings working on his startup. But this particular founder doesn’t have much choice: Between 8 a.m. and 2:55 p.m., he’s in high school. He’s 15.

Nick Dobroshinsky built an AI-powered finance tool with more than 50,000 monthly users, but he’s still just a sophomore in high school. 

“Around the end of eighth grade, I wanted to make some sort of business,” says Dobroshinsky, a sophomore in Sammamish, Wash. “I just spent a long time thinking about what problems there are that could be fixed with AI.”

baseuri="https://blankpaper.htdigital.in/wire-images/">With a little market-research help from his mom, who works in finance, and some early technical guidance from his dad, who works in AI at a big tech company, he landed on the idea of using AI models to generate reports on small- and mid-cap publicly traded companies. The result is BeyondSPX, an AI-based financial research platform.

Young and hungry entrepreneurs are nothing new: Bill Gates was 19 when he co-founded Microsoft; Mark Zuckerberg was the same age when he started Facebook. But today’s founders might well have a learner’s permit and a mouthful of braces.

Some got their start attending robotics camps, or building games on Roblox’s platform. One got his feet wet breaking into candy distribution. (Ever considered selling Gobstoppers to middle-schoolers in Singapore? It’s a cash cow.)

AI has fast-tracked both their interest in building a company and their ability to do it. Startup incubator Y Combinator doesn’t have age minimums to apply. Posting the right type of content might draw the attention of venture-capital firms on the lookout for young talent. VCs might not be ready to hand you millions, but they would like to get to know you and perhaps stay in touch.

Dobroshinsky says he has only handled around 10 lines of code and doesn’t have any employees: He prompts Anthropic’s Claude to generate the software and uses a combination of models including ChatGPT and Gemini. He doesn’t currently see the value in recruiting a marketing team.

“I use Reddit bots,” he says. “If someone asks for the best investing tools, then my bot will comment, ‘There’s a bunch of investing tools and BeyondSPX is one of them.’” He says he now has more than 50,000 monthly users on the platform, which is free. Dobroshinsky plans to start charging users eventually.

Greystone Logistics, a company covered by BeyondSPX, put out a press release touting the independent analysis.

“I actually thought to myself, ‘Maybe this guy just unleashed AI on every small-cap company,’” says Brendan Hopkins, an independent investor-relations consultant who works with Greystone. “I said, well, it’s a really good synopsis and it’s pretty positive, let’s put it out there,” he says. He didn’t know the platform’s founder was 15.

Kulveer Taggar, a venture capitalist based in San Francisco, says the age of founders has been trending down over the past few years—around the same time frame that ChatGPT and Claude became popular. It’s more common for him to get cold business-pitch emails from teens. Taggar says that is partially because building great software at scale is getting easier now. And while distribution is still a challenge, he says, younger founders might have it in their heads that if they’ve mastered TikTok or X, they can handle that part, too.

There’s an impatience and a mentality of, “I can’t wait X amount of years to do it. The opportunity is now,” says Taggar, adding, “There’s definitely something about AI making it feel like you can just learn very quickly.”

Raghav Arora, co-founder of the GetASAP grocery-inventory delivery service, got his start by selling American candy to his classmates in Singapore.

One company Taggar invested in was co-founded by Raghav Arora, who was accepted into Y Combinator in May as a 16-year-old.

Arora launched his first entrepreneurial venture as a student in Singapore. He tracked down U.S. candy that was hard to find in Asia and sold it to his classmates. It earned him good cash (and three days of detention). The endeavor taught him the ropes of product distribution, and how to maximize profit by cutting out middlemen. He started selling to mom-and-pop grocers in Singapore, too.

“I was marking these different items up by like 50%,” says Arora, now 17.

Arora’s latest company, GetASAP, distributes produce, using AI to forecast inventory for grocers. The startup, which has 48 employees, secures fruits and vegetables directly from farmers and then delivers them to stores in the U.S. and Asia. He and his 20-year-old co-founder secured $3.4 million in preseed funding in a round led by General Catalyst. Arora didn’t finish high school and now lives in Southern California.

Ali Partovi, who runs a San Francisco venture firm and startup accelerator called Neo, has spent years investing in young founders, often visiting college campuses to scout promising talent. (Neo led the first investment round in Cursor, maker of a wildly popular AI coding product.)

While Partovi admires the hustle of high-school entrepreneurs, he’d be hesitant to invest in one. High school might be a good time to conceive of ideas, but college is where to find the network of co-founders and early employees crucial to a startup’s success.

“The only thing I’m focused on is: Is this person going to attract people smarter than them?” he says. But these young founders are worth watching, he adds. “I would love to invest in their second startup.”

A general partner at Google Ventures recently met with a team of three co-founders: two are 20 and one is 17. The partner realized if the firm were to invest, he’d probably need to chat with the minor’s parents to see if he was really emotionally prepared for the founder’s journey and all the struggles that came with it. While he’s bullish on founders getting younger as a result of AI, not everyone can handle the stress at such a young age.

Alby Churven, 14 and an eighth-grader based in Sydney, Australia, was inspired after seeing app-building teen entrepreneurs take off on social media. He got his start selling soccer socks online and building Roblox games.

“At first, to be honest with you, it was purely a money thing,” he says. “But as I started doing it more and more, I actually like doing it.”

Churven recently applied to Y Combinator: His application video (which included a six seven joke) generated millions of views on X. On a recent trip to San Francisco, he met with venture capitalists and other founders.

Churven’s first startup, Finkle, was a gamified education app. He has since “stepped away from it” after realizing the idea wouldn’t scale. Like any good founder, Churven quickly pivoted to his backup idea: an AI tool that generates app and website code. He has paired with a co-founder and started to build the product, and is now networking.

If AI coding tools are enabling a whole new generation of founders, Churven wants to be building and selling those tools. “I want to capitalize on it,” he says.

Write to Katherine Bindley at katie.bindley@wsj.com