At a time when the wave of artificial intelligence entrepreneurship is rolling in, a young force is rising.
As the selection of the “Top 20 Most Promising AI Leaders Under 30” list comes to an end, we have selected several AI leaders with the highest voices from among the many, attempting to extract their portraits from their experiences.
We found that among the candidate list, 28.1% of entrepreneurs are born after 2000; 43.8% of entrepreneurs are concentrated in the AI application track, followed by the robotics track, with only 12.5% of entrepreneurs in the AI infrastructure track; In the background of entrepreneurial experience, nearly half of entrepreneurs have work experience in large companies, but 12.5% of entrepreneurs choose to drop out of school to start their own businesses.
Dropout school: using learning ability to compensate for lack of experience
Jiang Zheyuan, the founder of Songyan Power, never left the “one acre and three fen land” of Tsinghua Park from kindergarten to university. During his doctoral studies, he dropped out of school to start his own business and led a team to establish Songyan Power. We talked to Jiang Zheyuan about his entrepreneurial story two weeks ago. When he first started his business, his parents disagreed and even invited an entrepreneur friend to try to “speak up” and make him give up the idea. Unexpectedly, the “lobbyist” hired by his parents became Jiang Zheyuan’s earliest investor.
Like Jiang Zheyuan, there is also Fu Zhi, the founder of Gongji Technology, who suspended his studies to start a business. What he is doing is more like a ‘computing power drop’ business.
The explosion of AI agents has directly driven the demand for computing power in AI reasoning. When a large number of AI video generation companies, AI companion companies, and AI model companies explode, the demand for computing power becomes more refined. Fu Zhi’s approach is to let these companies use their idle computing power.
Elastic computing services have always had an “impossible triangle” – meeting the requirements of elasticity, stability, and low price simultaneously. What Gongji Technology does is to solve this’ impossible triangle ‘.
Fu Zhi initially created a computing power sharing platform for his own research needs. Later, he discovered that this demand was growing in the AI community. After successfully serving five clients, he began researching the specific needs of AI computing power, the processes and elements of sharing computing power, and the landscape of the cloud market. He then decided to take a leave of absence to start his own business.
These entrepreneurs who dropped out of school, despite not having much experience in the industry, found in the process of communicating with them that their learning ability is extremely strong.
The first step is “learning by doing”, they say, trying and exploring like a headless fly to form a preliminary feeling; Then I talked to industry professionals. I once met a dropout entrepreneur who told me that he had set a goal for himself – to call 10 industry professionals every day. These experiences greatly help these novice entrepreneurs establish valuable knowledge; The third is extensive reading. Jiang Zheyuan said that he has been reading the biography of Duan Yongping recently to learn his abilities in supply chain and channel management. He even takes many marketing courses. Fuzhi will organize weekly company study sessions and share reading notes to find experiences that are relevant to their business.
Big Factory Faction: Experienced Entrepreneurs
Of course, the majority of our candidate list consists of 43.8% of entrepreneurs who have worked in large companies before starting their own businesses.
For example, Song Yachen, the founder of AI 3D modeling company VAST, worked at SenseTime before founding VAST and was also employee 001 of MiniMax, a unicorn company specializing in general large models. He has landed multiple artificial intelligence projects at SenseTime, achieving the commercialization of AIGC technology in the animation and gaming industries.
During a media interview, Song Yachen said that SenseTime’s experience helped him understand what AI really is, comprehend its technical architecture and principles, and learn how to make basic technical judgments.
Guo Renjie, the founder of LeXiang Technology, previously served as the Executive President of Zhuimi Technology in China. During Zhuimi’s tenure, he led the marketing team and spent three years to grow Zhuimi’s business in China from 0 to a scale of 6 billion yuan. This valuable experience of growing has also been applied to the entrepreneurship of LeXiang Technology.
Another high proportion of entrepreneurs are young people who started their own businesses after graduation, accounting for 34.4%. Most of them are PhD graduates, similar to dropout entrepreneurs who, despite not having enough industry experience, have devoted themselves to the wave of entrepreneurship through strong learning abilities.
Young entrepreneurship: focusing on AI applications and robotics tracks
In our candidate list, the majority are entrepreneurs in the field of AI applications, accounting for 43.8%, followed by entrepreneurs in the robotics industry, accounting for 37.5%.
This is the dividend of this round of AI entrepreneurship. Under the atmosphere of code, it is not difficult to manually develop an AI application. Technology is no longer the key threshold. In the direction of AI application, it tests not only the understanding of the industry, but also the taste of products, the understanding of young people, and the thinking of growth.
The direction of AI applications, especially consumer grade AI applications, does not require excessive industry resource accumulation, making them more friendly to young people.
Here lies a great insight into user needs and a devilish pursuit of details; Understand how to create a ‘fan ecosystem’.
Therefore, cross disciplinary backgrounds are very important. We have sorted out the resumes of these candidates, and most of them have cross disciplinary backgrounds. For example, Liu Zidong from Habitat Technology founded a consumer oriented AI 3D space design company, which can generate specified 3D design plans for apartment layouts with just one sentence. This is related to Liu Zidong’s interdisciplinary background in architectural design and AI, as it requires not only AI technology but also design taste and aesthetics.
In addition, understanding marketing is crucial. We have seen many young entrepreneurs running their own self media accounts on our candidate list. For example, Hu Yuhang, the CEO of Shouxing Technology, is a blogger on Xiaohongshu with 282000 followers. He shares his products and entrepreneurial experiences on Xiaohongshu.
Fast iteration, business thinking, running through the business closed loop
In our communication with them, rapid iteration and successful implementation of business models are the key to these young people standing out.
When we communicate with many founders, especially student entrepreneurs without experience in big companies, they initially jump into the commercialization “trap” and enter the barrier of “my technology is good, but the technology does not match the market”. Therefore, the ability to commercialize is a great challenge for young entrepreneurs. In our candidate list, most of these companies were established around 2023, with the youngest being established in 2025, but several of them have already achieved tens of millions of revenue a year later.
The companies here usually have 2-3 iterations per week, and even if they find that this business model cannot continue, they will quickly transform, expand or transform into new business forms.
For example, VAST expanded from a product targeting C-end users to providing engineer production tools for PGC scenarios in May last year; The AI Agent of Language Core Technology, originally PMF, was an enterprise level agent platform for developers, which could be used to build any vertical agent. Later, they realized that this approach was not focused enough and could not directly solve customer pain points, so they quickly transformed into an AI Agent focused on pre-sales.
This is actually a characteristic of this round of AI entrepreneurship, as many companies are no longer what they were originally established. In the Demo Day of YC, the largest incubator in the United States and a globally renowned incubator, many projects have already undergone one or two transformations within a month. Young people do not have the burden of past experience and are very easy to accept new ideas and technologies, which is the advantage of this generation of young people.
The luckiest thing for a person is to discover their mission on the journey of life, in the prime of their life, “said Stephen Zweig.
In short, these entrepreneurs under the age of 30, after the release of ChatGPT, carried their understanding of AI and used the “anti common sense” problem-solving approach of entrepreneurship to try to answer their future imagination.
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