Thiel Foundation Unveils 2026 Class of Thiel Fellows
The Thiel Foundation has officially unveiled its 2026 class of Thiel Fellows, awarding a new cohort of young entrepreneurs the resources and runway to pursue their most ambitious ideas outside conventional institutional paths.
Established in 2011, the two-year Fellowship grants each recipient $250,000 over the course of the program, along with access to a network spanning tech founders, investors, scientists, and alumni fellows. In exchange, fellows commit to working full-time on their projects, companies, or ideas. The program has long distinguished itself by investing in the individual as much as the venture — a deliberate departure from credential-driven gatekeeping.
“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 2026 class joins more than 300 previous fellows. Prior classes include the founders of Anthropic, Cognition, Etched, Ethereum, Figma, Fluidstack, Mercor, and Positron. Collectively, fellowship alumni have founded companies and projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
This year’s class spans logistics, fintech, robotics, AI infrastructure, fraud prevention, and neuroscience — a range that reflects both the breadth of the fellowship’s mandate and the particular obsessions of the current generation of technical founders.
Victor Boyd (Birmingham, AL) is building Cavalla, a logistics company with a long arc: autonomous forklifts today, hypersonic highways tomorrow, with the stated ambition of getting anything anywhere in under five hours.
Samuel Carvalho (Recife, Brazil) is developing Praso, wholesale commerce infrastructure for underserved SMBs in Brazil — covering procurement, credit, and workflow tooling for a market that traditional financial rails have largely ignored.
Nick Dobroshinsky (Sammamish, WA) founded EveryTicker to bring institutional-grade financial research to the full U.S. equity market, including the thousands of smaller companies that mainstream Wall Street analysis routinely bypasses.
Ishan Gupta (Kanpur, India) is building Juicebox, an AI recruiter designed to replace guesswork in hiring with agents that evaluate real skills — a direct attack on the credentialism and pattern-matching that dominates corporate talent acquisition.
Antoni Kiszka (Strzyżowice, Poland) is working on Derpetual, infrastructure for creating leveraged markets around any asset class — a broadly scoped bet on financial primitives.
Milan Lustig (Cold Spring Harbor, NY) founded Opt32 to build compute infrastructure that puts AI directly onboard physical objects — robots, vehicles, drones — where latency and power constraints make edge inference the only viable architecture.
Galen Mead (Chapel Hill, NC) is building Standard Intelligence, a lab training large models to actively explore and learn from the Internet rather than passively absorbing static pretraining corpora — a fundamental rethink of how aligned general learners are developed.
Aubrey Niederhoffer (New York, NY) is building Swoop, a super app targeting Africa starting with food delivery in Nigeria and extending into financial services — a market-entry playbook reminiscent of how dominant consumer platforms emerged in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Harry O’Connor (Cork, Ireland) founded Sentient Machines, a research lab building foundational robotics models designed to generalize across tasks and environments rather than overfit to narrow deployment contexts.
Alex Shieh (Salem, NH) created The Antifraud Company, which uses AI and investigative journalism to pursue fraud against American taxpayers — a bounty-hunter model that monetizes accountability rather than compliance theater.
Claire Wang (Los Angeles, CA) is building biologically accurate simulations of entire nervous systems, beginning with C. elegans. The project aims to develop a simulated brain researchers can interact with, establishing foundations for brain-computer interface technology.
Kyler Wang (Portland, OR) is building an artificial intelligence company in stealth under the name Action.
The 2026 class is notable for its geographic and thematic range — fellows hailing from Poland, Brazil, India, and Ireland alongside American founders, working on problems from African logistics to neuroscience simulation. The Fellowship’s bet, as ever, is that the most consequential work happens when exceptional people are freed from the institutional gravity that ordinarily shapes how talent gets allocated and deployed.