Govind Gnanakumar was in diapers when Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Like the Meta founder, he won’t wait for a university diploma to start his business.
The 19-year-old dropped out of the Georgia Institute of Technology in May to focus full time on his artificial-intelligence startup, Automorphic. He is among a swarm of teenagers and 20-somethings leaving college behind to capitalize on a gold rush in AI.
The debut of ChatGPT and Bard brought the faraway promises of conversational, helpful AI closer to reality, setting off a rush of investment and new companies that automate tasks and transform work. More than 25% of American startup investments have gone to AI companies so far this year, according to Crunchbase, an industry tracker.
The size of the market for generative-AI applications—$43 billion for enterprise-technology AI alone this year, according to PitchBook—and the rapid pace of development have young founders ditching class and jumping in. Numbers of dropouts-turned-founders aren’t tracked, but several founders accepted to this summer’s cohort by Y Combinator, a prominent startup accelerator program, left campus for their companies.