Who got rich on artificial intelligence: billionaires of the new era

In the past year, 19 new AI billionaires emerged with a combined wealth of $59.3 billion. These are not scientists or engineers who built AI from scratch. Most of them simply found where it was needed right now—and integrated it into everyday work.

Now AI works for people

When AI was just gaining momentum, the main money was concentrated around infrastructure: data centers, chips, and training large models. It was then that the first wave of AI billionaires appeared.

The new 19 operate differently. They don’t build the foundation—they build on it. They take ready-made language models and embed them where people previously spent hours on paperwork: law firms, hospitals, and development departments.

The idea is simple: give every professional a personal AI assistant. For a lawyer—to review a case in minutes that used to take a day. For a doctor—to instantly find the necessary research. For a developer—to write code without even knowing it thoroughly. It is here that new fortunes are currently being created.

Cerebras: two billionaires in one day

The most prominent story on this list is Cerebras. It makes chips specifically for AI and has long been considered Nvidia’s main competitor.

In May 2026, Cerebras went public on the Nasdaq. This became the largest IPO of the entire year. On the first day of trading, the stock rose by 68%, and the company reached a market capitalization of $95 billion.

Founder and CEO Andrew Feldman amassed a fortune of $3.2 billion—his stake in the company is about 5.5%. Co-founder and CTO Sean Lee holds $1.7 billion. They began building the company together back in 2015. On the day of the IPO, Feldman said on air: “Not a bad day, right?”

Replit: code without programmers

Amjad Masad created Replit as a platform where anyone can write an app or website—even without knowing how to program. You simply explain to the AI what you need, and it does it.

To date, Replit has over 50 million users. More than 150,000 of them pay for a subscription. Among corporate clients are 85% of companies on the Fortune 500 list, including Atlassian, PayPal, and Adobe. The company expects its revenue to reach $1 billion by the end of 2026.

Vercel: AI-powered websites

Guillermo Rauch founded Vercel as a platform for developers—those who create websites and web applications. With the advent of AI, the company skyrocketed: its tools now help launch products faster and integrate AI into them without complex configurations.

In the past year, the user base doubled. Revenue grew by 82%. The company’s flagship AI tool, v0—which turns a text description into a ready-made interface—is used by more than 3.5 million people. Vercel’s clients include OpenAI, Anthropic, Nike, and Walmart. The latest funding round valued the company at $9.3 billion.

Harvey: AI for lawyers

Winston Weinberg and Gabriel Perera founded Harvey in 2022. Their product is an AI assistant for law firms. It analyzes documents, prepares case materials, and takes over the routine work that used to be handled by entire teams.

The company grew rapidly. In March 2026, Harvey raised $200 million in funding, and investors valued it at $11 billion. By the end of 2025, the company’s annual recurring revenue reached $190 million—double what it was in August of the same year.

EvenUp: the “worst idea” worth $3 billion

Rami Karabiber, Ray Meshanetz, and Saam Mashad founded EvenUp in 2019. The platform helps personal injury lawyers—cases involving accidents, mishaps, and workplace injuries. This is a huge market worth $61 billion, but the work is bogged down in paperwork: each case takes an average of two years, and a lawyer handles about 100 cases simultaneously.

EvenUp automates exactly this part: collecting medical documents, drafting claims, and preparing materials for negotiations.

When the founders were just starting out and pitching to investors, they were told to their faces: “Legal tech is bad. AI is unclear. Personal injury is uninteresting. Three strikes at once.” They were rejected again and again. Now EvenUp is worth $3 billion, with total raised investments of $385 million.

Hebbia: AI analyst for banks

George Sivulka dropped out of Stanford’s graduate program at age 23—and founded Hebbia in 2020. The idea came from friends working in finance: they reported spending huge amounts of time searching for information across hundreds of documents—reports, contracts, regulatory filings.

Hebbia solves exactly this problem. The platform simultaneously scans billions of documents—PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations, call transcripts—and answers complex questions that previously required days of work by an analyst.

Clients include major banks, hedge funds, and law firms. Through the platform, assets worth more than $15 trillion worldwide are analyzed.