Ben Taylor

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.