The Thiel Foundation announced its 2026 class of Thiel Fellows, awarding a new group of young entrepreneurs $250,000 each over two years to pursue breakthrough ideas across industries, including AI, fintech, robotics, and infrastructure.
Founded in 2011, the Thiel Fellowship is designed to support individuals who choose to bypass traditional academic and career paths in favor of building companies and technologies. Fellows receive funding, mentorship, and access to a network of founders, investors, and scientists, while committing to work full-time on their projects.
The 2026 class joins more than 300 previous fellows, including founders behind companies such as Anthropic, Figma, and projects like Ethereum. Collectively, Thiel Fellows have created companies and initiatives valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.
This year’s cohort reflects a globally diverse group of founders working across sectors such as autonomous logistics, financial infrastructure, artificial intelligence, robotics, and advanced computing. Their projects range from AI-driven hiring platforms and fraud detection systems to robotics intelligence, embedded compute, and biologically accurate simulations for brain-computer interface development.
The 2026 Thiel Fellows include:
- Victor Boyd (Birmingham, AL) — Cavalla is building autonomous logistics systems, starting with forklifts and expanding toward hypersonic transportation networks designed to move goods anywhere in under five hours.
- Samuel Carvalho (Recife, Brazil) — Praso is developing infrastructure for wholesale commerce, including procurement, credit, and workflow tools for small and medium-sized businesses in underserved regions.
- Nick Dobroshinsky (Sammamish, WA) — EveryTicker is democratizing institutional-grade financial research across the U.S. stock market, including coverage of smaller, underfollowed companies.
- Ishan Gupta (Kanpur, India) — Juicebox is building an AI-powered recruiting platform that evaluates real skills to improve hiring outcomes and reduce bias.
- Antoni Kiszka (Strzyżowice, Poland) — Derpetual is creating infrastructure to enable leveraged markets for a wide range of asset classes.
- Milan Lustig (Cold Spring Harbor, NY) — Opt32 is developing compute infrastructure to bring AI capabilities directly onto physical devices such as robots, vehicles, and drones.
- Galen Mead (Chapel Hill, NC) — Standard Intelligence is building general AI systems that actively explore and learn from the internet through pretraining.
- Aubrey Niederhoffer (New York, NY) — Swoop is developing a super app for Africa, beginning with food delivery in Nigeria and expanding into financial services.
- Harry O’Connor (Cork, Ireland) — Sentient Machines is a research lab building foundational AI models for robotics that generalize across tasks and environments.
- Alex Shieh (Salem, NH) — The Antifraud Company is using AI and investigative journalism to detect fraud and protect taxpayers.
- Claire Wang (Los Angeles, CA) — Developing biologically accurate simulations of entire nervous systems, starting with C. elegans, to advance brain-computer interface technology.
- Kyler Wang (Portland, OR) — Action is an artificial intelligence company currently operating in stealth.
The fellowship continues to emphasize both the individual entrepreneur and the originality of their ideas, supporting unconventional approaches to innovation and long-term thinking about the future of technology and society.
KEY QUOTE:
“The Boomer career tracks no longer lead anywhere worth going. These Gen Z iconoclasts have chosen their own paths.”
Peter Thiel, Chairman, Thiel Foundation
