Yin Qi, 30 Megvii Seven years ago, Yin Qi founded a company called Megvii with two college friends in Beijing. Now people from over 220 countries and regions use Megvii’s face-recognition platform, Face++. The company has more than 1,500 employees. Face++ has …Continue reading
Elizabeth Nyeko
Elizabeth Nyeko, 34 Modularity Grid Elizabeth Nyeko thinks she’s found a solution to one of rural Africa’s key development challenges: how to electrify communities in a way that’s affordable—and efficient. As CEO of Modularity Grid, a London-based startup, Nyeko builds technologies that …Continue reading
Ashutosh Saxena
Ashutosh Saxena, 34 Brain of Things Ashutosh Saxena is the CEO and cofounder of Brain of Things, which developed an AI system called Caspar that turns a home into a sort of robot that we can talk to and interact with. By …Continue reading
William Woodford
William Woodford, 32 Form Energy For renewables to work, they need batteries—otherwise, the lights go out when the sun goes down or the wind isn’t blowing. Companies like Tesla and Hyundai are addressing the problem by developing football-field-size lithium-ion batteries in Australia …Continue reading
Ji Xu
Ji Xu played a key role in building the world’s largest payment platform, which can support more than a billion transactions a day. It’s a boon to commerce, but more important, it enables anyone—especially people without access to traditional banks—to use financial …Continue reading
Alice Zhang
Alice Zhang, 29 Verge Genomics Traditional approaches to drug development for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) haven’t offered patients much. Alice Zhang is trying something new. Her company, Verge Genomics, uses artificial intelligence to identify promising compounds, refining …Continue reading
Alexandre Rebert
Alexandre Rebert, 28 ForAllSecure When a computer system gets hacked, people typically fix the problem after the fact. Alexandre Rebert created a machine that can fix itself as the attack is happening. Rebert recognized that computers may lack creativity, but they’re good …Continue reading
John Schulman
John Schulman, 30 OpenAI John Schulman, a research scientist at OpenAI, has created some of the key algorithms in a branch of machine learning called reinforcement learning. It’s just what it sounds like: you train AI agents in the same way you …Continue reading
Alessandro Chiesa
Alessandro Chiesa, 30 University of California, Berkeley For all the promise of blockchain, there’s a problem that comes with treating all transactions as public information: some of that stuff is just nobody’s business. But with Zcash, a cryptocurrency cofounded by Alessandro Chiesa, …Continue reading
Humsa Venkatesh
Humsa Venkatesh’s research revealed how cancers hijack the activity of neural networks to fuel their own growth. Her discovery sparked a novel area of research targeting a type of activity seen in many different types of cancer. “These neuronal systems are signaling …Continue reading