The Rising Stars of AI: Meet the Indian-Origin Innovators Dominating Forbes’ 2026 “30 Under 30” List
Artificial intelligence has become the defining technology of the decade, reshaping industries with unprecedented speed. But while corporations and legacy research institutions continue to wield influence, much of the truly disruptive innovation is emerging from small, hyper-focused teams led by visionary young founders. This year’s Forbes 2026 “30 Under 30” List for Artificial Intelligence highlights exactly that—breakthrough builders who are not just riding the AI wave but actively designing its future.
A striking pattern emerges from the list: a remarkable number of the honorees are of Indian origin, representing the global Indian diaspora’s deepening influence on Silicon Valley, the AI ecosystem, and the broader technology landscape. These founders are pioneering advances across enterprise automation, security compliance, financial modeling, voice interfaces, tax intelligence, and more—often at astonishing scale despite their youth.
Below is an in-depth look at the Indian-origin innovators redefining AI in 2026, the companies they’re building, and how their work is accelerating the next phase of global technological transformation.
1. Adit Abraham & Raunak Chowdhuri
Cofounders, Reducto
In the rapidly expanding universe of AI tooling, Reducto has emerged as one of the most indispensable platforms for companies drowning in digital workflows. Founded by Adit Abraham and Raunak Chowdhuri, the company has already processed over 250 million pages—a staggering number that reflects both the scale of the problem and Reducto’s effectiveness in solving it.
The platform works as a powerful automation layer enabling organizations to analyze, audit, and extract insights from sprawling document systems. Enterprise users include major players like Scale AI, Vanta, and Airtable, each depending on Reducto to streamline compliance, structure data, and eliminate manual drudgery.
From a financial standpoint, Reducto is one of the highest-performing startups on this year’s list. It has raised over $100 million in funding and was last valued at $600 million as of October 2025—a remarkable trajectory for founders still early in their careers.
Abraham and Chowdhuri represent a new breed of operators who combine technical depth with sharp enterprise sensibilities. Their innovations in document automation are helping define how modern companies manage their information flows, making them standout additions to the Forbes list.
2. Advith Chelikani
Cofounder, Pylon
Customer communication is more fragmented today than at any point in history. B2B teams juggle messages from Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, in-app chats, ticket portals, and community platforms, creating enormous inefficiencies. Advith Chelikani, alongside cofounders Robert Eng and Marty Kausas, set out to solve this chaos through Pylon, a unified platform that consolidates customer issues from every possible channel.
Pylon’s approach is deceptively simple but systemically transformative: one dashboard, dozens of integration points, and AI-powered tools that classify, prioritize, and route customer problems instantly. This kind of streamlining has made Pylon indispensable for high-growth technology companies.
The proof is in the customer base: over 750 B2B clients, including AI leaders like ElevenLabs, Together.ai, and productivity platform Linear. These are companies that themselves build tools for developers and creators—making their adoption of Pylon a strong signal of trust.
Chelikani’s work sits at the intersection of workflow automation and customer experience, and his contribution represents a major leap in how companies manage long-tail operational complexity. Pylon’s rise makes him one of the most strategically impactful founders in this year’s cohort.
3. Karun Kaushik
Cofounder, Delve
Few founding stories capture the classic image of startup grit quite like Karun Kaushik’s. Delve began in an MIT dorm room, built with cofounder Selin Kocalar, and originally set out to develop AI-powered medical scribes. But as they iterated, the founders realized a deeper, more universal problem: organizations struggle to understand and comply with the complex frameworks of data privacy, security, and regulatory standards.
Out of this insight, Delve pivoted and evolved into a compliance automation powerhouse. Today, the company uses AI to automate the end-to-end process of achieving standards like SOC 2 and HIPAA, transforming what was once a months-long, paperwork-heavy ordeal into a fast, predictable workflow.
Delve now serves over 500 companies, including AI platforms like Lovable, and is widely seen as one of the most technically robust players in the compliance space.
Their growth attracted major investment attention. The startup recently closed a $32 million funding round, led by Insight Partners, at a $300 million valuation—an impressive marker for a company still evolving and expanding its product footprint.
Kaushik embodies the combination of technical intuition and adaptability that defines the modern AI entrepreneur. His willingness to pivot, rethink, and refocus is a key reason Delve stands out among this year’s honorees.
4. Samir Dutta & Kunal Tangri
Cofounders, Farsight
Finance is one of the last major industries to fully integrate AI into its most time-consuming internal processes. But with Farsight, MIT graduates Samir Dutta and Kunal Tangri, alongside cofounder Noah Faro, are rapidly changing that.
The trio is building AI agents capable of generating financial models, pitch decks, and research memos—all in formats identical to what investment banks and private equity teams use every day. Tasks that once took analysts hours, or even days, can now be done in seconds.
Such tools aren’t just conveniences—they fundamentally reshape the workflow of financial institutions. Junior analysts spend enormous time formatting spreadsheets, writing memos, and assembling decks; Farsight’s platform automates this foundational work, freeing teams to focus on strategy and decision-making.
It’s no wonder Farsight has already onboarded around 30 financial institutions, primarily among investment banks and private equity firms. In a sector known for its conservative technology adoption, this level of early traction is significant.
Dutta and Tangri’s contributions highlight the increasing role AI will play in high-stakes decision environments. Their recognition on the Forbes list underscores how essential workflow automation is becoming in knowledge-heavy industries.
5. Nikhil Gupta
Cofounder, Vapi
AI voice technology has progressed rapidly, but one of its biggest challenges has been achieving natural, real-time conversational flow. Nikhil Gupta, cofounder of Vapi, set out to solve this problem from the ground up.
Interestingly, Vapi did not begin as a developer platform. Gupta and cofounder Jordan Dearsley originally explored building an AI therapist—a system designed to hold supportive, empathetic conversations with users. But as the team advanced their voice models and latency architectures, they discovered a more compelling opportunity: enabling other developers to build voice-enabled agents of their own.
Thus, Vapi pivoted into a specialized platform offering tools for creating voice-enabled AI agents that can hold natural conversations with human-like latency. This shift opened the door to use cases across customer support, telemedicine, hospitality, and personal assistance.
Vapi’s technology is now regarded as one of the most fluid and responsive voice-AI infrastructures available. Gupta’s work is pushing the frontier of multimodal interaction, enabling AI to move from text boxes into real-world conversations.
6. Finsam Samson
Cofounder, Accordance
Complex tax and accounting problems have long resisted automation, largely due to the dense logic, interpretation, and context-specific reasoning required. Finsam Samson, alongside former Stanford classmate David Yue, founded Accordance in 2024 to directly tackle this challenge.
Their ambition is bold: to build an AI system capable of handling intricate financial and regulatory problems that traditional software cannot. Accordance isn’t simply digitizing tax workflows—it aims to reason over financial rules, exceptions, and edge cases, approaching tasks currently performed by highly specialized professionals.
This vision resonated strongly with top-tier investors. Accordance has raised over $13 million in seed funding from a powerhouse lineup consisting of Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Sequoia, and Anthropic. Such backing is a strong indicator of the company’s technical promise and the size of the problem it hopes to solve.
Samson’s inclusion in the Forbes list signals the industry’s growing recognition that the next frontier of AI lies in domains requiring deep analytical reasoning, not just pattern recognition. Accordance aims to bring that future to accounting and finance—a space ripe for disruption.
A Generation Defining the Future of AI
The young innovators highlighted by Forbes’ 2026 “30 Under 30” list represent more than individual success stories—they signify a generational shift. Their work demonstrates:
- AI is becoming integral to every enterprise workflow, from customer support to financial modeling to compliance.
- Indian-origin founders continue to play a major role in shaping Silicon Valley’s most technically sophisticated companies.
- Rapid pivots and product adaptability are increasingly key to success.
- The future of AI will depend as much on infrastructure and automation tools as on cutting-edge models.
Together, these founders are forging the next stage of technological evolution—one in which AI is not merely a lab experiment or a standalone feature, but a deeply embedded partner across every digital ecosystem.
As the world watches AI reshape industries, the individuals on this list are not just participating in the transformation—they are authoring it. Their achievements today form the foundation for innovations the rest of us will rely on tomorrow.
