According to Forbes, a new unreported analysis by Devon Triplett of 021T Capital Management reveals Harvard and MIT have spawned 27 AI unicorns collectively worth over $146 billion. These companies reach $1 billion valuations in just four years on average, with roughly half founded by people under 25 years old. The ecosystem includes six “decacorns” valued at nearly $10 billion each: Scale AI, Perplexity, Applied Intuition, Cursor, Cognition, and Mercor. Top investors include Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator with 11 projects each, while Harvard/MIT founders make up about 40% of the entire Forbes Top 50 AI companies list. The report predicts these trends will continue with more dropouts founding billion-dollar companies and universities providing compute resources to fuel student entrepreneurship.
The kids are more than alright
Here’s the thing that really stands out: we’re not just talking about faster company growth, we’re talking about dramatically younger founders. Five of the six decacorns came from founders under 25. That’s not just impressive—it’s fundamentally changing who gets to play in the big leagues. The barriers to building a massive company are collapsing, and AI tooling is essentially giving superpowers to people who might still be in college. But is this sustainable? Or are we creating a generation of founders who’ve never experienced a down cycle?
Who’s writing the checks
And then there’s the money. The investor list reads like a VC hall of fame—Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund. Even chip giants like Nvidia and Intel Capital are getting in early. What’s interesting is how concentrated the betting has become. When you see the same names backing multiple companies from the same ecosystem, it suggests they’ve identified a genuine pattern, not just gotten lucky. They’re basically mining the Harvard/MIT pipeline systematically.
Where the heat is
The report breaks down the companies into what Triplett calls the “Heat Index”—developer tools like Cursor and LangChain, answer engines like Perplexity, infrastructure plays, and vertical AI applications. What’s striking is how value is dispersing across the entire stack. It’s not just one category winning. This suggests the AI revolution has legs—it’s creating opportunities at every layer, from the foundational infrastructure to specialized applications. For enterprises looking to adopt AI, this is both exciting and overwhelming. The ecosystem is maturing fast, but the sheer volume of options can be paralyzing.
The new normal
So what does this all mean? We’re witnessing the complete compression of the innovation cycle. Companies scale faster, founders start younger, and value accumulates quicker than ever before. The report’s prediction that we’ll see unicorns reaching $1 billion on less than $20 million raised would have been unthinkable a decade ago. This efficiency is partly driven by better tools, but it’s also about mindset. The success of these early AI companies creates a template that others can follow. And for businesses trying to stay competitive, whether they’re manufacturing firms needing reliable computing hardware from suppliers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com or software companies building new products, the pressure to adapt has never been greater. The age of the 10x programmer might be over, but the age of the 10x company is just beginning.
