The rise of AI has generated a new hypermillionaire saga who are breaking all limits of wealth to date. All you have to do is go through the list of 10 of the greatest fortunes in the world of Forbes to discover that eight of these great assets arise from this technology.
However, this was only what Bloomberg called “the first wave”, in which the founders of the great generalist AI models such as OpenAI have risen. Anthropic either deepseek. Now is the time for specialized AI agents and their founders they are also getting rich.
The 19 new barons of AI. As and as I pointed out BloombergAmerican AI startups have created 19 new billionaires in the last year with a combined fortune estimated at about $59.3 billion.
These 19 new millionaires join the 41 founders who, thanks to the success of their AI models they had already become millionaires in the “first wave.” However, what is striking about this increase is not only the number, but the profiles of who are behind these million-dollar startups: a poet, three scholarship recipients from the Peter Thiel program without a university degree or a self-taught immigrant.
AI agents are the new oil. Reflection AI It is one of the most obvious cases of this new wave of AI millionaires. The startup is dedicated to creating agents capable of programming, debugging and understanding code almost independently. This new market It has turned its founders into millionaires.
It is estimated that Ioannis Antonoglou and Misha Laskin have achieved a fortune valued at around $4 billion each. However, the company did not emerge from nowhere, Antonoglou was part of the team that developed AlphaGo, from the revolutionary Google DeepMind model that achieved beat humans at Go.
An AI wants to be your lawyer and your doctor. Without leaving aside AI agents, Harvey is another success story in this segment, allowing the automation of legal research, the drafting of legal documents and the review of contracts with AI. Founded by lawyer Winston Weinberg and AI researcher Gabe Pereyra while they shared a flat, its AI agent Harvey, named after the protagonist of the popular lawyer series Suits, has become one of the most used in companies and law firms. Each of its founders is the owner of an estimated fortune of 1.6 billion.
In the healthcare field, OpenEvidence has followed a similar path. Its founder, Daniel Nadler, already sold the financial analysis platform Kensho to S&P Global in 2018 for $550 million. With OpenEvidence, it applied the same logic to the medical sector: its AI assistant has accumulated more than 100 million consultations and the company has almost quadrupled its valuation in six months to reach 12 billion, raising Nadler’s assets to 7.2 billion dollars at the beginning of 2026.
The Thiel Fellows: from recruitment to labeling. Mercor is another example that was difficult to imagine just a few years ago. Their three foundersBrendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, met at a high school debate. The three classmates left the university to join the Thiel Scholarshipthe PayPal co-founder’s program that pays $250,000 to young people to leave their studies and start a company.
Initially it was a recruiting platform, but they switched to data labeling providers for OpenAI and Anthropic, hiring doctors, engineers and scriptwriters to train AI models specialized in these areas. As a result of this change, Mercor went from earning 100 million in 2025 to 1,000 million at the beginning of 2026, with a valuation of 10 billion. That leaves each of the founders with an estimated fortune of $1.9 billion.
The ecosystem versus the giants. Vercel is another example of how the startups that are succeeding in this second wave of unicorns emerged from AI. We are no longer talking about AI models, but about the infrastructure that allows deploying applications generated with AI.
Its founder, Guillermo Rauchimmigrant Argentinian and self-taught who learned English by reading software manuals to learn how to program, turned a tool for developers into a very profitable platform that has given him an estimated fortune of more than 1.9 billion dollars
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Image | Brendan Foody
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