The Thiel Foundation revealed the 2024 class of Thiel Fellows, assembling a group of 20 intelligent young minds set to disrupt various industries. Launched in 2011, the Thiel Fellowship provides each recipient $100,000 and access to a robust network of tech founders, investors, scientists, and former fellows. Fellows are asked to commit to focusing full-time on their projects, companies, or ideas free from traditional academic constraints.
This new class joins 270 previous fellows. The alumni include Ethereum, Figma, Loom, Luminar, OYO, and Stord founders. Since the Fellowship’s inception, fellows have founded companies worth billions of dollars.
The class includes:
Adarsh Hiremath (Sunnyvale, CA), Brendan Foody (Menlo Park, CA), Surya Midha (San Jose, CA)
Mercor is building an AI vetting infrastructure to understand the tasks people are good at. And Mercor’s AI interviewer conducts superhuman interviews by asking questions personalized to every candidate’s background.
Alexandra Debow (Hong Kong)
swsh captures your memories: every celebration, birthday, and vacation, with an AI-powered shared photo album, ensuring you can make those unforgettable experiences happen repeatedly.
Augustus Doricko (Stamford, CT)
Rainmaker is fulfilling humanity’s role as responsible stewards of the Earth by enhancing cloud-seeding technology to combat drought and transform deserts into habitable landscapes.
Charlie Wu (Fairfax, VA)
Orchard Robotics monitors the billions of fruits in orchards and uses AI to help farmers feed the world with the best food they’ve ever grown.
Christopher Zhu (Boston, MA), Gavin Uberti (Seattle, WA), Robert Wachen (Potomac, MD)
Etched is building the hardware for superintelligence, starting with transformer-specific AI chips that run models at unprecedented speeds and scale. Next-generation AI models are set to become GDP-scale investments, requiring the largest infrastructure buildout in history. To make this feasible, Etched is creating a new computing paradigm.
Diogenes Casares (Woodside, CA)
Stream seamlessly integrates the benefits of centralized exchanges with DeFi’s decentralized nature, enhancing liquidity and security while eliminating custodial risks and reshaping the crypto trading landscape.
Govind Gnanakumar (Folsom, CA)
Automorphic is building AI models that learn new information more efficiently than humans.
Felipe Meneses (Aracaju, Brazil)
Hyperplane is a data intelligence platform that empowers financial institutions to make multi-billion dollar decisions using specialized LLMs trained on consumer banking data. It enables the rapid creation of hundreds of state-of-the-art predictive models.
Jacob Rodriguez (Los Angeles, CA)
Oligo is revolutionizing the production of space-grade hardware and orbit-ready spacecraft by making the process as efficient and accessible as manufacturing car parts.
Joseph Semrai (Queens, NY)
Explore Interfaces is developing a contextual LLM-based operating system that will enable hyper-personalized applications and challenge long-held assumptions about interactions between computers, devices, and our daily lives. This will usher in a new era of human-computer interaction.
Luke Farritor (Lincoln, NE)
The Vesuvius Challenge is accelerating the reading of the Herculaneum Papyri, the last surviving library of the Roman Empire.
Pavel Asparouhov (Salt Lake City, UT)
Silna is streamlining patient intake and building more efficient infrastructures to enable providers to focus on world-class care and to ease the trillion-dollar tax burden that is the US healthcare system.
Peter Hansen (Chester, England)
Januus is mapping cryptowallets for physical locations and people on a global scale.
Tarun Amasa (Manhattan, NY)
Endex is building the first autonomous and super-intelligent financial analyst.
Walden Yan (Avon, CT)
Cognition AI is an applied AI lab focused on reasoning. Devin, an AI software engineer and teammate, is their flagship product, bringing in a new era of economic prosperity.
Yash Patil (Austin, TX)
OpenAI research engineer evaluates language models and create systems for machines to collaborate with less human oversight.
KEY QUOTES:
“Today’s universities are as corrupt as the medieval Catholic Church. The Reformation is underway.”
– Peter Thiel
“This year’s class understands the importance of the present moment. They reject the well-worn paths of red tape, digital distractions, and self-censorship. By refusing to sit idle while others succumb to conformity’s paralysis, they’re positioned to finally deliver on the future.”
– Alex Handy, director of the Thiel Fellowship
