The sums of money that the artificial intelligence boom has created in the span of a few years border on unthinkable.
OpenAI, which debuted ChatGPT in late 2022, is poised to become one of the world’s most valuable startups with a $300 billion valuation. Anthropic, created in 2021 by a team of former OpenAI employees, is worth more than $60 billion. Safe Superintelligence launched in October and has already notched a $32 billion valuation.
This vast wave of enthusiasm has also minted a new generation of billionaires.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index calculated that across four AI companies, 15 founders have amassed stakes worth a cumulative $38 billion. Those ranks are poised to swell based on funding rounds reported to be in the works. If those close, at least another 14 individuals with collective holdings worth $33 billion will be added to the group, including at Thinking Machines Lab, a brand-new startup already reported to be seeking a $9 billion valuation.
All of the companies declined to comment or didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Silicon Valley is no stranger to tech booms, from the dot-com bubble to the social media craze to the rise of the sharing economy. But even wealth advisers who’ve seen the booms and busts up close say the speed of the AI revolution — from startup idea to attracting mega backers and billion-dollar valuations — stands out.
“The velocity is different,” said Rick Gordon, a Silicon Valley-based senior managing director at Citizens Private Wealth. “It’s happened, I don’t want to say overnight, but it’s happened very quickly.”
However, cracks may be starting to emerge. CoreWeave Inc., a former crypto mining company that pivoted to AI, priced its initial public offering at a $23 billion valuation Thursday night, well below the more than $35 billion it sought, and shares closed unchanged in its market debut Friday. Still, its three founders were billionaires after the IPO.
To quantify the skyrocketing wealth, Bloomberg used a combination of PitchBook and Bloomberg data to calculate investor ownership and deducted a standard-sized employee pool based on Carta data to determine the founders’ stakes. That’s divided by the number of founders to determine the average value of their holdings. At many companies, the split is unequal.
To be sure, most of the money remains on paper and many of the companies could go to zero overnight. Their status as private companies — or startups nestled inside nonprofits in the case of OpenAI — has made many fortunes too opaque to calculate. In other cases, such as Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, the company could be worth anywhere from $1 billion to more than $150 billion — making its founder either a mere billionaire or one of the world’s richest people.
Here are the companies minting the next wave of billionaire founders:
Anysphere
Year Founded
2022
Valuation
$10 billion (Not Closed)
Founders
Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, Aman Sanger
Average Founder Stake Value
$1.3 billion
Notable Investors
Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Thrive Capital
Known for its AI coding tool Cursor, Anysphere’s four founders met as friends at MIT. The startup has surpassed $100 million in ARR in only 12 months, making it one of the fastest-growing startups of all time. It was valued at $2.5 billion in a round announced in January, but is reportedly in talks for a funding round that would raise its valuation to $10 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Anthropic
Year Founded
2021
Valuation
$61.5 billion (03/2025)
Founders
Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Christopher Olah
Anthropic was created in 2021 by a team of former OpenAI employees, led by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei. The company, known for its chatbot Claude, has quickly emerged as one of the largest players with an annual revenue run rate of about $1 billion late last year, Bloomberg has reported. The San Francisco-based startup raised $3.5 billion in funding at a $61.5 billion valuation in early March, turning its seven founders into billionaires.
CoreWeave
Year Founded
2017
Valuation
$23 billion (03/2025)
Founders
Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, Brannin McBee
Average Founder Stake Value
$1.7 billion
Notable Investors
Nvidia, Coatue Management, Jane Street, OpenAI
In 2017, three former commodities traders took a gamble and started a crypto mining business. After crypto markets collapsed two years later, they pivoted to AI and began leasing out the GPUs they’d bought to large language model developers. Their timing couldn’t have been better: CoreWeave — still led by co-founders Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee — began trading on the Nasdaq Friday after pricing at a $23 billion valuation, the biggest US technology IPO since 2023. Board member Jack Cogen’s stake is also approaching $1 billion. The company, which operates 32 data centers in the US and Europe, is a major compute supplier to Microsoft and owns more than 250,000 GPUs. “When it funnels down to the physical infrastructure that’s required to actually build and drive [AI] computing power, there’s a relatively small number of companies that have the capacity to scale up and deliver,” Intrator told Bloomberg last June. “CoreWeave is, fortunately, one of them.”
Figure AI
Year Founded
2022
Valuation
$39.5 billion (Not Closed)
Founders
Brett Adcock
Average Founder Stake Value
$16.6 billion
Notable Investors
Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos
Figure AI’s goal is to build AI-enabled humanoids that will “make a positive impact on humanity and create a better life for future generations,” according to the master plan published by founder Brett Adcock. The company has said that the robots could perform dangerous jobs and help alleviate labor shortages. Adcock also founded Vettery, a staffing marketplace that was sold for more than $100 million in 2016, and Archer Aviation, the developer of an electric aircraft that went public in 2021. Figure is in talks with investors including Align Ventures and Parkway Venture Capital to raise $1.5 billion at a $39.5 billion valuation.
Perplexity
Year Founded
2022
Valuation
$18 billion (Not Closed)
Founders
Aravind Srinivas, Johnny Ho, Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats
Average Founder Stake Value
$1.1 billion
Notable Investors
Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, SoftBank, Databricks, Yann LeCun
CEO Aravind Srinivas, who spent a year as a scientist at OpenAI, joined quant trader Johnny Ho, Databricks co-founder Andy Konwinski and Facebook AI researcher Denis Yarats to start Perplexity in 2022, billing the platform as an AI-powered search tool designed to compete with Google. The startup attracted early investments from Nvidia and Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun. News outlets including the New York Times and Forbes accused Perplexity in 2024 of using its content without permission; a lawsuit filed by the publisher of the Wall Street Journal is still in litigation. Perplexity was receiving over 100 million weekly search queries as of October. “No one’s ever had an explicit search product with that level of surface area that can truly make Google treat you as a genuine competitor,” Srinivas told Bloomberg this month.
Safe Superintelligence
Year Founded
2024
Valuation
$32 billion (02/2025)
Founders
Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, Daniel Levy
Average Founder Stake Value
$6.7 billion
Notable Investors
GV (formerly Google Ventures), Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Sequoia Capital
Israeli-Canadian Ilya Sutskever was chief scientist at OpenAI before leaving in May following a dispute with founder Sam Altman over the company’s commitment to curbing AI’s potential risks. A month later he announced his latest venture, Safe SuperIntelligence, with co-founders Daniel Levy, another OpenAI veteran, and Daniel Gross, a former Apple AI lead and investor. Safe SuperIntelligence isn’t generating revenue and doesn’t plan to sell AI products in the near future, with Sutskever telling Bloomberg in June that “its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then.”
Scale AI
Year Founded
2016
Valuation
$14 billion (05/2024)
Founders
Alexandr Wang, Lucy Guo
Average Founder Stake Value
$1.7 billion
Notable Investors
Accel, Index Ventures, Nvidia, Y Combinator
Alexandr Wang started Scale AI with Lucy Guo when he was 19. The startup helps label and prepare data so that it can be used to train machine learning models and counts OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and US government agencies among its customers. Guo left the company shortly after its founding and holds a minority stake of around 5%, while Wang owns about 19%, or a stake worth $2.7 billion, according to Bloomberg’s calculations.
Thinking Machines Lab
Year Founded
2025
Valuation
$9 billion (Not Closed)
Founders
Mira Murati, Barret Zoph, John Schulman, Lilian Weng and Andrew Tulloch are among more than 30 people listed as the “founding team.”
Average Founder Stake Value
$1.4 billion
Notable Investors
None reported so far
After more than six years at OpenAI, Mira Murati announced she was leaving her job as CTO in September and recruited dozens of researchers — including ChatGPT co-creator Barret Zoph and OpenAI co-founder John Schulman — to the founding team of Thinking Machines Lab, which came out of stealth in February. The San Francisco-based company, which doesn’t yet have a product and hasn’t officially reported raising any money from outside investors, says it intends to focus on “human-AI collaboration.” Business Insider last month reported that Thinking Machines Lab was aiming to raise $1 billion at a $9 billion valuation, citing people familiar with the matter.
(Updates CoreWeave share move in eighth paragraph.)
