Paper Billionaires Emerge from A.I. Start-Ups as Valuations Soar

The latest artificial intelligence boom has created a new group of billionaires — mostly on paper — as investors pushed private start-up valuations to unprecedented levels this year. Notable founders who reached nine-figure or billionaire paper wealth include Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo of Scale AI (which received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta), the Cursor co‑founders Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Arvid Lunnemark (whose company was valued at $27 billion), and leaders of Perplexity, Mercor, Figure AI, Safe Superintelligence, Harvey and Thinking Machines Lab.

Examples of rapid valuation jumps cited by the companies and data trackers include Thinking Machines Lab reaching a $10 billion valuation by June without a released product; Safe Superintelligence being valued at $32 billion after raising $2 billion; Perplexity at about $20 billion; Figure AI reporting Brett Adcock’s net worth at $19.5 billion; Harvey rising to an $8 billion valuation from $3 billion in February; and Mercor valued at $10 billion in October.

The surge has been unusually fast compared with past tech fortunes, with many of the start-ups founded after the release of ChatGPT and their founders still in their 20s and 30s. “This A.I. moment is making some very young people very, very, very rich, very quickly,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor who studies the tech economy.

Key Topics

Tech, Scale Ai, Meta, Cursor, Perplexity, Safe Superintelligence