Build a billion-dollar bank. Start an audit firm.
That’s the move Lunar co-founders Ken Villum Klausen and Peter Andreasen are making with Repodo, which uses AI to prepare audit records and documentation, with qualified auditors providing final sign-off.
Other next acts are harder to guess. A former executive at luxury resale marketplace Vestiaire Collective is building autonomous systems. A co-founder of payroll company PayFit is building AI for security video.
We used CB Insights People data to identify leaders who helped build billion-dollar businesses and founded AI companies in 2025 or 2026. The chart below connects the industries they came from with what they’re building now.
CB Insights customers can see 2,100+ AI founders who have achieved $1B+ valuations.
Many leaders are staying in familiar industries
Twelve of the 17 leaders from enterprise software are building in that category again, as are eight of the 13 from financial services and insurance.
Insurance offers several examples:
But Sullivan of Nevado says he is changing how he builds the team this time:
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“Previously, we were hiring tens and hundreds of people in a quarter…we don’t feel like we need as many people in order to do what we’re doing.”
He says the company is automating back-office work so it can concentrate spending on engineering, sales, and other customer-facing roles.
Read our full interview with NevadoAI COO David Sullivan here.
Five new companies are already unicorns
Recursive Superintelligence, Core Automation, Astromech, Upscale AI, and Genki Robotics are already valued at $1B or more. All five fall within the chart’s frontier and deep tech group, covering AI development, computing infrastructure, robotics, and scientific research.
- Colossal is working to bring back extinct species. Co-founders Benjamin Lamm and George Church’s new company, Astromech, uses genetic data assembled at Colossal to develop AI that predicts biological changes, such as how drug resistance develops.
- You.com provides web search tools for AI. Founder Richard Socher’s new company, Recursive Superintelligence, is developing AI that runs experiments and rewrites its own code to improve, with AI research as its first target.
Consumer and retail leaders are turning to business customers
Eleven leaders in the cohort previously helped build consumer and retail businesses. None are building another company in that category. Nine are developing AI for business operations; the other two are entering robotics and autonomous systems.
For some, the new customer is a business much like the one they previously ran:
Both ventures turn experience running consumer businesses into software for other operators.
Physical AI is drawing some unexpected entrants
These leaders are building machines, supplying robot training data, and developing software for physical-world tasks:
- From marketplaces to robotics: Lucas Ngoo co-founded online marketplace Carousell. His new company, Cortex AI, collects real-world data to train robots. Aleksander Djurka, formerly CIO at luxury resale marketplace Vestiaire Collective, founded Axair Systems to develop autonomous unmanned systems for civilian and defense uses.
- From hardware and aviation to robots: Android co-creator Andrew Rubin, who also founded smartphone maker Essential Products, is building humanoids at Genki Robotics. Former air-taxi developer Volocopter CTO Sebastian Mores co-founded Hive Robotics, which develops technology to coordinate robots across air, land, and water.
- From payroll to security cameras: PayFit co-founder Florian Fournier’s Orasio uses AI to detect potential threats and search security footage. Orasio sits under enterprise software in our chart; the other four companies fall under mobility, robotics, and hardware.
The table below lists all 59 leaders and their new AI companies.
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