One Gen Z high school dropout with two tech businesses to his name has just become Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire following a breakout investing round—before even turning 30. James Dacombe, the 25-year-old serial entrepreneur behind AI chipmaker Olix and brain monitoring startup CoMind, just hit a personal net worth of over $1 billion.
Just two years ago, Dacombe launched his London-based firm Olix, which tripled in value since February and raised $312 million from investors earlier this month, boosting the company’s market cap to $3.3 billion. It also pushed the bank account of Dacombe, who owns an estimated 30% stake in the company, over the billion-dollar threshold.
Meanwhile, Dacombe also owns a 12% stake in CoMind, a company he created in 2017 and still leads. CoMind raised $102.5 million in August last year, contributing to his eye-watering net worth.
The British Gen Z founder is just one of 11 self-made billionaires in the world under 30 years old, and one of four who don’t live in the U.S.
How James Dacombe became a billionaire
Dacombe was destined to build. He began programming apps and websites at just 13 years old, attending private school Ashville College in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, before taking his A levels in physics, math, economics, and business. But the then-teenager knew the academic life wasn’t for him.
So at 17 years old, Dacombe dropped out of high school to scale his budding company, CoMind. And four years later, he’d take on a major opportunity to accelerate his business.
The founder then took the Thiel Fellowship: a two-year competitive program established by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel that grants budding entrepreneurs $250,000 to skip college and pursue their entrepreneurial passions.
It’s a fellowship that has kick-started the careers of billion-dollar successes like ScaleAI’s Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo—and now, Dacombe can add his name to the list of success stories.
“An advantage of starting my business so young was naivety,” Dacombe told the Sunday Times in 2024. “You don’t have the scar tissues from what hasn’t worked, so you just try a lot of things. Fortunately, some of them work.”
Fortune reached out to Olix and CoMind for comment.
The tech revolution is minting Gen Z billionaires
The tech revolution is breaking market cap records and minting billionaires at a breakneck pace. And the workforce’s youngest generation is leveraging their tech savvy to found unicorn companies before even hitting their thirties. Now, Gen Z founders are constantly beating one another out in being the youngest self-made billionaires in the world.
In the explosion of the internet era, Mark Zuckerberg quickly floated to the top as the youngest self-made billionaire. He built Facebook out of his college dorm room—a company now known as the $1.5 trillion titan Meta—and hit a net worth of $1 billion in 2008 at just 23 years old. He held the spot for several years before being overtaken by his slightly younger Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who reached the 10-figure threshold in his mid-twenties.
Other tech visionaries have since swooped up the spots.
In 2015, fellow college dropout Evan Spiegel, the cofounder of Snapchat, took the throne when he became a billionaire at 24. Now, AI is generating a tidal wave of wealth that’s flowing into the pockets of Gen Zers; the sector minted more than 50 new billionaires in 2025 alone, as investors funneled over $200 billion into the industry, and AI startups were on the receiving end of 50% of funding worldwide.
Over the past year, U.S. AI startups have created 19 billionaires with a combined fortune of $59.3 billion, according to a March 2026 Bloomberg analysis.
In 2022, ScaleAI raised $325 million at a $7.3 billion valuation, catapulting then-24-year-old entrepreneur Wang to the youngest self-made billionaire spot. Wang’s fellow cofounder, Guo, later surpassed Taylor Swift in becoming the youngest woman to hit the eye-watering net worth, and has since passed the baton to Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara. Shayne Coplan, the founder and CEO of prediction market giant Polymarket, later held the world title at 27 years old. And less than a month later, a new Gen Zer would assume his spot at the top.
In 2025, Mercor’s twentysomething founders Surya Midha, Brendan Foody, and Adarsh Hiremath all became billionaires after the company was valued at $10 billion in a private funding round last October. They’ve since held on to their status as the youngest self-made billionaires, boasting net worths around $1.9 billion to $2.2 billion. Young tech founders are accumulating wealth at a dizzying pace—and Mercor’s founders say the wealth still feels somewhat abstract.
“It’s definitely crazy,” Foody told Forbes after hitting the $10 billion valuation last year. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.”
