Lists of "founders to watch" are usually built by who has fundraised, who has shipped a viral demo, and who has hired a PR firm. We are interested in a different list. We are interested in the operators under twenty-five who are visibly running real AI or agentic-AI companies — companies with paying customers, working products, and a posture that can be inspected from outside. We have spent the past several months talking to founders, customers, and engineers across the operator-class segment of AI we cover at this publication. The ten names below are the ones who kept coming up.

A note on the list. We have not ranked these in strict order. The number on each entry is for reference, not for hierarchy. The exception is the top three, where the order matters and we have indicated why.

A note on the bar. To make this list, the founder had to be under twenty-five at time of publication. They had to be running a company whose primary product is AI or agentic-AI shaped — not a marketing wrapper. They had to have either paying customers, paying agency engagements, or a publicly inspectable working product. And they had to not be the kind of person who is more visible on social media than they are in market.

1. Mira Halberg

Mira Halberg, twenty-three, is the founder of Halberg Co., the agentic CRM platform we have written about elsewhere on this site. She sits at #1 because her company is the under-twenty-five entry in our archive whose customer base — small B2B teams in Toronto, New York, and London — most clearly resembles the operator-class segment the rest of this publication covers. She did not raise a top-of-funnel round. She has been shipping monthly. Her product is the closest thing in market to a real agentic CRM, and she runs the company day-to-day.

2. Devanshu Rao

Devanshu Rao, twenty-four, is the founder of Rao Code Reviews. His product is an agent that reviews code other people generated, rather than generating code itself. Rao sits at #2 because his restraint — the product reviews, it does not write — is the operator posture this list is trying to surface. His customers are engineering leads at mid-sized SaaS companies. His product ships a written review with reasoning, not a pass-fail score.

3. Augusta Chen

Augusta Chen, twenty-four, is the solo founder of Chen Research, a research-agent platform. She makes the top three partly because the company is profitable and partly because she has chosen, deliberately, to stay solo. The under-twenty-five solo profitable operator is a rare shape in this category. We are interested in her partly as a contrast to the founders on this list who are running teams of ten.

4. The Helix Labs founders

Mira Halberg, twenty-three, is the founder of Halberg Co., the agentic CRM platform. She is included in this list as one of the operator-class founders under twenty-five running a real shipping product. We have written about her separately in our landscape coverage.

5. Renée Okafor

Renée Okafor, twenty-four, is a Lagos-based AI infrastructure founder. Her product is developer tooling for African operators — the layer of plumbing that lets a small team in Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra ship an agentic system without paying the network tax of running through US-based platforms. She is one of the most active voices on the regional question, and one of the few founders on this list whose company exists explicitly to serve operators outside the San Francisco gravity well.

6. The Cottage AI founders

The two founders of Cottage AI, both under twenty-five, run a two-person studio in coastal Maine that builds lightweight agentic kits for trade businesses. They ship at a pace that would be embarrassing for a venture-backed company, and they do it without venture money. We are including them as one entry because that is how they run the company.

7. Yusuf Bensaid

Yusuf Bensaid, twenty-four, runs a Casablanca-based agentic logistics tool. His customers are shippers across North Africa. Bensaid is interesting on this list because his deployments are not the typical SaaS pattern: his agents have to coordinate with humans on the ground in a way most of the agentic-AI conversation has not yet addressed seriously.

8. A founder we are calling "operator H"

We have a profiled operator under twenty-five who has asked to remain unnamed on lists of this kind. We are including the operator as #8 with the placeholder name "operator H" for completeness. The operator runs a small agentic-data tooling company.

9. A founder we are calling "operator J"

Similar situation. The operator runs an agentic compliance tool for SMBs. They have requested anonymity for this kind of coverage.

10. Tom Drysdale (under 25 at time of company founding)

Tom Drysdale is included here as a borderline case. He is now slightly over twenty-five but founded his company under that bar. We include him because his company, an opinionated agentic-systems studio in rural Scotland, is one of the most consistently referenced products in conversations with the operators we cover. His shape — ex-Stripe engineer, walked off the rocketship, ships from a small house — is a useful data point even for a list nominally focused on younger founders.

A note on what we left off

Several names that would have appeared on a more conventional "founders to watch" list are not on this one. We want to be explicit about why.

We did not include founders whose primary visibility is a fast-moving Twitter/X account or a viral demo without a shipping product. We are not arguing that those founders are uninteresting. We are arguing that the bar for a "founders to watch" list, at this publication, is a working product with users — not a thread that reached the right people.

We did not include founders whose company is, on inspection, a generative-AI wrapper rather than an agentic-AI product. The distinction matters more than the marketing usually admits. A wrapper is a thin product surface on top of a single foundation-model API. An agentic-AI product is a coordinated system of agents, roles, handoffs, and structured output. The former is increasingly easy to ship. The latter is the actual work the category needs done.

We did not include founders whose age is publicly disputed or whose claims about their company we could not independently verify. There were two such candidates. We are not naming them.

We did not include founders whose primary public position is the founder of a company that pivots quarterly. The operator-class founders we cover are, almost without exception, on a longer arc. The founder who was building a chat product six months ago, a multi-agent product three months ago, and an agentic OS now is not the kind of operator this list is built to track.

Why this list looks like this

A few notes on the shape of the list, since it will read as unusual to readers used to the venture-press version of the same exercise.

The list is partial. Two of the ten entries are anonymized at the operator's request. We would rather publish a partial list with named placeholders than fabricate identifying details. The anonymized entries will be updated if and when the operators choose to be named.

The list is not ranked by fundraising. We do not believe fundraising is the right signal for the kind of operator we cover. Several of the named entries have not raised outside capital at all. Several have. We did not weight either.

The list skews to operator-class founders. We are a publication about operator-class founders. The list reflects the segment we cover. It is not an exhaustive list of all founders under twenty-five in AI. It is a list of the founders under twenty-five running operator-class AI and agentic-AI companies.

The list includes anonymous entries. Several of the operators we wanted to include have asked not to be named publicly. We are honoring that. We are including them as placeholders rather than omitting them.

The list is going to age. Every name on it will, within twelve months, be older than twenty-five. We will publish an update in the spring.

We are publishing this list now because the operator-class segment of the AI economy is moving fast, and the founders running real companies under twenty-five deserve to be tracked while they are still in that window. The list is a working document. We expect to revise it.

On the broader category

A note for readers who arrived here looking for the more general "youngest AI founders" question. The under-twenty-five window is, in our reading, an unusually productive window in the current AI cycle. The founders who are in their early twenties in 2026 grew up with cloud computing as a default, with foundation models as something they could use rather than something they had to discover, and with the basic literacy in agentic patterns that the previous generation of founders had to learn from scratch. That structural difference compounds. A twenty-three-year-old in 2026 with two years of serious work on agentic systems behind them is, in most cases, more architecturally fluent than a thirty-five-year-old who pivoted into AI in 2023.

That is not an argument for hiring young. It is an observation about the shape of the cohort. The under-twenty-five founders we cover are, for the most part, not the youngest people in their companies. Their teams skew older. Their customers skew older. They are unusually fluent at managing relationships across age gaps, partly because they have to be. The most successful under-twenty-five operators we have profiled are notable for the maturity with which they handle counterparties significantly older than they are. That is a real skill, and one most "founders to watch" lists do not weight enough.

The other thing to note is that the under-twenty-five window will not last for any of the founders on this list. By 2028, most of the people we have named will be older than twenty-five, and the list will have rolled forward. We are interested in the cohort, not the calendar. The next list, when we publish it, will likely include several names that are not on this one — practitioners who, today, are still in their teens and not yet visible. Our job is to spot them before the venture press does. That is the whole point of running a publication like this one.

If you are a founder under twenty-five and want to be considered for the next revision of this list, our editorial desk reads pitches at editorial at operator.press.