New class includes 20 dropouts in semiconductors, AI, space tech, and more

LOS ANGELES: The Thiel Foundation has unveiled the 2024 class of Thiel Fellows, assembling a group of 20 brilliant young minds who are set to disrupt various industries.

Established in 2011, the Thiel Fellowship provides each recipient with $100,000 and access to a powerful network of tech founders, investors, scientists, and former fellows. All that is asked of the fellows is that they commit to focusing full-time on their projects, companies, or ideas unencumbered by traditional academic constraints.

"Today's universities are as corrupt as the medieval Catholic Church. The Reformation is underway," said 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,” said Alex Handy, director of the Thiel Fellowship. “By refusing to sit idle while others succumb to conformity’s paralysis, they’re positioned to finally deliver on the future.”

The new class joins 270 previous fellows. Alumni include founders of Ethereum, Figma, Loom, Luminar, OYO, and Stord. Since the Fellowship’s inception, fellows have founded companies collectively worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Meet the Class:

Adarsh Hiremath: Sunnyvale, CA
Mercor is building AI vetting infrastructure to understand the exact tasks people are good at. Mercor’s AI interviewer conducts superhuman interviews by asking questions tailored to every candidate’s individual background.

Alexandra Debow: Hong Kong
swsh will be there to capture your memories - every celebration, birthday, and vacation - with an AI-powered shared photo album, ensuring you can make those unforgettable experiences happen again and again.

Augustus Doricko: Stamford, CT
Rainmaker is fulfilling humanity's role as responsible stewards of the Earth through pioneering advanced cloud-seeding technology to combat drought and transform deserts into habitable landscapes.

Brendan Foody: Menlo Park, CA
Mercor is creating a unified global labor market capable of facilitating interviews and evaluations of everyone on Earth. Labor aggregation is the most impactful opportunity in history.

Charlie Wu: Fairfax, VA
Orchard Robotics is putting eyes on each of the billions of fruit in orchards, and using AI to help farmers feed the world with the best food they've ever grown.

Christopher Zhu: Boston, MA
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. Etched is creating a new computing paradigm to make this feasible.

Diogenes Casares: Woodside, CA
Stream seamlessly integrates the benefits of centralized exchanges with the decentralized nature of DeFi, enhancing liquidity and security while eliminating custodial risks and reshaping the landscape of crypto trading.

Gavin Uberti: Seattle, WA
Etched was founded because the next 100x of scale requires silicon to be customized for a model’s architecture. Flexible AI chips don’t make sense in a world where training a single model costs more than designing an entire chip.

Govind Gnanakumar: Folsom, CA
Automorphic is creating 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, enabling 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 through 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, enabling hyper-personalized applications and challenging long-held assumptions about the interaction between computers, devices, and our daily lives, ushering 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 a more efficient infrastructure to allow 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 to physical locations and people on a global scale.

Robert Wachen: Potomac, MD
Etched is solving the compute cost and speed bottlenecks hampering every company on this list. Specialized AI chips are inevitable and will change the world.

Surya Midha: San Jose, CA
Mercor is utilizing AI vetting to create opportunities for millions of smart people who were previously undiscovered due to society’s misplaced reliance on flawed signals like the prestige on someone’s resume.

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. Their flagship product Devin, an AI software engineer and teammate, is ushering in a new era of economic prosperity.

Yash Patil: Austin, TX
OpenAI research engineer evaluating language models and creating systems for machines to collaborate with less human oversight.

To join the revolution and apply for the Thiel Fellowship, please click here.

Thiel Fellows are hiring. Explore open opportunities here.

Fonte: Business Wire