Rory O'Reilly

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.

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.

Plaid CEO @zachperret says AI agents will rely on credit cards, not stablecoins, for payments in the near term: "For as far as I can see, which in this environment is maybe a year or something like that, I think agents using credit cards is going to be by far the primary thing that happens." "The reason for that is merchants accept credit cards. Merchants don’t accept stablecoins, for the most part, for most of the things that a consumer wants to do." "Now, over time, certain types of merchants might start to accept stablecoins. The question is: will the companies that care about making credit cards really easy be able to make them sufficiently easy in the amount of time before merchants actually start thinking about accepting stablecoins?" "And my hunch is, you’ve seen, I think @tryramp actually launched an agentic credit card... I know there’s a bunch of other agentic credit cards that are out there, and I can’t imagine that there will not be 5,000 YC companies launching agentic-focused credit cards soon." "So I think we will see more and more options pop up. That’s not to say I’m not a believer in stablecoins. I think it’d be super cool, but I just don’t think it’s realistic in a short time frame."