Max Glik

Welcome 2026 Thiel Fellows! WHO ARE THEY? Victor Boyd: Birmingham, AL - @VictorWBoyd Cavalla is on a mission to get anything anywhere in under 5 hours. Starting by building autonomous forklifts, through to developing hypersonic highways. Samuel Carvalho: Recife, Brazil - @samuelclcc Praso is building the new infrastructure for wholesale commerce — powering procurement, credit, and workflow tools for SMBs across underserved areas in Brazil. Nick Dobroshinsky: Sammamish, WA - @NDobroshinsky EveryTicker is democratizing institutional-grade financial research across the entire U.S. stock market, including the thousands of smaller companies Wall Street ignores. Ishan Gupta: Kanpur, India - @ishangpta Juicebox is building an AI recruiter that helps companies make better hiring decisions. Agents that understand real skills and move hiring from guesswork to true meritocracy. Antoni Kiszka: Strzyżowice, Poland - @antoni_kiszka Derpetual is building the infrastructure to create a market for any asset — with leverage. Milan Lustig: Cold Spring Harbor, NY - @HighPriestOfSWO Opt32 is building modern compute infrastructure to put AI onboard objects in the physical world — from robots to cars and drones. Galen Mead: Chapel Hill, NC - @g413n Standard Intelligence is building aligned general learners, pretraining large models to actively explore and learn from the Internet. Aubrey Niederhoffer: New York, NY - @needaubrey Swoop is building the super app for Africa, starting with food delivery in Nigeria and expanding into financial services across the continent. Harry O'Connor: Cork, Ireland - @HarryOC493 Sentient Machines is a research lab building foundational models for robotics that generalize across tasks and environments. Alex Shieh: Salem, NH - @alexkshieh The Antifraud Company is a fraud bounty hunter defending American taxpayers with AI and investigative journalism. Claire Wang: Los Angeles, CA - @clairebookworm Claire is building biologically accurate simulations of entire nervous systems, starting with C. elegans. Developing a simulated brain that researchers can communicate with helps lay the foundation for brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Kyler Wang: Portland, OR - @kylerywang Action is an artificial intelligence company in stealth.

We (@slashapp) raised a $100M Series C at $1.4 billion valuation to build the world's most powerful business banking platform.¹ The round was led by @RibbitCapital, and co-led by @khoslaventures & @GoodwaterCap. And we're releasing Twin: the world’s first AI private banker.

This is the story of Hyperliquid, the most profitable startup per employee on earth, told from a guarded office in Singapore. Last year, its team of 11 generated $900 million in profit. It's 3 years old, has never taken a dollar of venture capital, and is beginning to change how century-old markets work. Its founder, Jeffrey Yan (@chameleon_jeff), had never taken a physics class when he picked up a textbook at 16. Two years later, he won gold at the International Physics Olympiad. In 2019, he started trading with $10,000 from a living room in Puerto Rico—working off a television because he didn't own a monitor. Within 3 years, he was running one of the largest anonymous crypto trading firms. Then he shut it down. Yan was rich and free, but he had spent years inside crypto, watching it betray itself. Bitcoin's central premise was decentralization. Yet the biggest exchanges were centralized. Crypto kept reintroducing the dependence on trust it was built to eliminate. He set out to create what should have existed. Hyperliquid is a blockchain with a trading exchange on top, and anyone can build on it. Yan's vision is to house all of finance. In 3 years, it has done over $4 trillion in volume. And in the past few months, it has begun to outgrow crypto. Markets for oil, silver, and the S&P 500 now trade on Hyperliquid around the clock, weekends included, and are growing roughly 40% week on week. When the US and Israel bombed Iran on a Saturday in February, Hyperliquid was the venue traders turned to. Hyperliquid's success has cost Yan his freedom. He works out of a secret office in Singapore and cannot travel without two bodyguards. Even the team's housekeeper doesn't know what they do. In January, @domcooke spent a week at their office. Read his profile on Yan and @HyperliquidX below.