One Gen Z high school dropout with two tech businesses to his name has just become Europe\u2019s youngest self-made billionaire following a breakout investing round\u2014before even turning 30. James Dacombe, the 25-year-old serial entrepreneur behind AI chip-making firm Olix and brain monitoring startup CoMind, just hit a personal net worth of over $1 billion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Dacombe launched his London-based firm Olix just two years ago, which tripled in value since February and raised $312 million from investors earlier this month, boosting the company\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Dacombe also owns a 12% stake in CoMind\u2014a company he created in 2017, and still leads\u2014raised $102.5 million in August last year, which contributes to his eye-watering net worth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019t live in the U.S.\u00a0<\/p>\n
How James Dacombe became a billionaire<\/h2>\n
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\u2019t for him.<\/p>\n
So at 17 years old, Dacombe dropped out of high school to scale his budding company: CoMind. And four years later, he\u2019d take on a major opportunity to accelerate his business.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a fellowship that has kick-started the careers of billion-dollar successes like ScaleAI\u2019s Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo\u2014and now, Dacombe can add his name to the list of success stories.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAn advantage of starting my business so young was naivety,\u201d Dacombe told The Sunday Times<\/em> in 2024. \u201cYou don\u2019t have the scar tissues from what hasn\u2019t worked, so you just try a lot of things. Fortunately, some of them work.\u201d<\/p>\nFortune <\/em>reached out to Olix and CoMind for comment.<\/p>\nThe tech revolution is minting Gen Z billionaires\u00a0<\/h2>\n
The tech revolution is breaking market cap records and minting billionaires at a breakneck pace. And the workforce\u2019s youngest generation is leveraging their tech savvy to found unicorn companies before even hitting their 30s. Now, Gen Z founders are constantly beating each other out in being the youngest self-made billionaires in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2014a company now known as the $1.5 trillion titan Meta\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n
Other tech visionaries have since swooped up the spots.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 start-ups were on the receiving end of 50% of funding worldwide.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the past year, U.S. AI start-ups have created 19 billionaires with a combined fortune of $59.3 billion, according to a March 2026 Bloomberg <\/em>analysis.<\/p>\nIn 2022, ScaleAI raised $325 million at a $7.3 billion valuation, catapulting\u00a0 then-24-year-old entrepreneur Wang to the youngest self-made billionaire spot. Wang\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2025, Mercor\u2019s 20-something founders Surya Midha, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath all became billionaires after the company was valued at $10 billion in a private funding round last October. They\u2019ve since held onto 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\u2014and Mercor\u2019s founders say the wealth still feels somewhat abstract.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s definitely crazy,\u201d Foody told Forbes<\/em> after hitting the $10 billion valuation last year. \u201cIt feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n#Billionaire #Gen #Zer #dropped #high #school #launch #startup #17now #hes #Europes #richest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One Gen Z high school dropout … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2497,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4819,274,479,269,1405,4818,1148,1715,635,542,536,478,880,2784,1891,4815,644,645,646,1155,4820,4816,2688,892,385,56,81,667,3801,4817],"class_list":["post-2496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-17now","tag-billionaire","tag-billionaires","tag-business","tag-chief-executive-officer-ceo","tag-dropped","tag-england","tag-europes","tag-founders","tag-gen","tag-gen-z","tag-hes","tag-high","tag-high-school","tag-launch","tag-net-worth","tag-palantir","tag-personal-finance","tag-peter-thiel","tag-rich-people","tag-richest","tag-road-to-wealth","tag-school","tag-startup","tag-tech","tag-uk","tag-wealth","tag-young-adults","tag-young-workers","tag-zer"],"yoast_head":"\n
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