2026 class features entrepreneurs focusing on FinTech, Robotics, AI and more

MIAMI: Today, The Thiel Foundation has officially unveiled its 2026 class of Thiel Fellows, rewarding an ambitious and bright class of young people ready to disrupt and redesign industries across the United States and the world.

Established in 2011, the two-year Thiel Fellowship awards grants to extraordinary young entrepreneurs, affording them the opportunity to untether themselves from groupthink and traditional tracks. Each fellow in this year’s class will receive an award of $250,000 over the next two years, giving them the time and resources to pursue their groundbreaking endeavors.

Fellows will have access to a valuable network of tech founders, investors, scientists, and former fellows. In return, they must commit to working full-time on their projects, companies, or ideas. The Fellowship prides itself on placing an emphasis on both the individual as well as the project or idea that drove the individual to apply.

“The Boomer career tracks no longer lead anywhere worth going. These Gen Z iconoclasts have chosen their own paths,” said Peter Thiel, Chairman of The Thiel Foundation.

The new class joins over 300 previous fellows. Prior classes include founders of Anthropic, Cognition, Etched, Ethereum, Figma, Fluidstack, Mercor, and Positron. Since the Fellowship’s inception, fellows have founded companies or projects collectively worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

About the New Class (Name: Hometown)

• Victor Boyd: Birmingham, AL
  • Cavalla is on a mission to get anything anywhere in under 5 hours. Starting by building autonomous forklifts, through to developing hypersonic highways.
• Samuel Carvalho: Recife, Brazil
  • Praso is building the new infrastructure for wholesale commerce - powering procurement, credit, and workflow tools for SMBs across underserved areas in Brazil.
• Nick Dobroshinsky: Sammamish, WA
  • EveryTicker is democratizing institutional-grade financial research across the entire U.S. stock market, including the thousands of smaller companies Wall Street ignores.
• Ishan Gupta: Kanpur, India
  • Juicebox is building an AI recruiter that helps companies make better hiring decisions. Agents that understand real skills and move hiring from guesswork to true meritocracy.
• Antoni Kiszka: Strzyżowice, Poland
  • Derpetual is building the infrastructure to create a market for any asset - with leverage.
• Milan Lustig: Cold Spring Harbor, NY
  • Opt32 is building modern compute infrastructure to put AI onboard objects in the physical world - from robots to cars and drones.
• Galen Mead: Chapel Hill, NC
  • Standard Intelligence is building aligned general learners, pretraining large models to actively explore and learn from the Internet.
• Aubrey Niederhoffer: New York, NY
  • Swoop is building the super app for Africa, starting with food delivery in Nigeria and expanding into financial services across the continent.
• Harry O'Connor: Cork, Ireland
  • Sentient Machines is a research lab building foundational models for robotics that generalize across tasks and environments.
• Alex Shieh: Salem, NH
  • The Antifraud Company is a fraud bounty hunter defending American taxpayers with AI and investigative journalism.
• Claire Wang: Los Angeles, CA
  • Claire is building biologically accurate simulations of entire nervous systems, starting with C. elegans. Developing a simulated brain that researchers can communicate with helps lay the foundation for brain-computer interface (BCI) technology.
• Kyler Wang: Portland, OR
  • Action is an artificial intelligence company in stealth.

About The Thiel Foundation

The Thiel Foundation supports science, technology, and long-term thinking about the future. For more information, see www.thielfoundation.org.

To apply for the Thiel Fellowship, please click here.

Fonte: Business Wire