Cognition founder Steven Hao becomes the youngest member of the Forbes 400 with a net worth of $5.8 billion

At 30, with a net worth of 30 billion yuan—this is a scene that could probably only happen in the AI era.

This year's Forbes 400 list was released, and the youngest person on it is a 30-year-old Chinese programmer—Steven Hao, born in 1996, a graduate of MIT.

Rewind three years: he led the founding of AI coding company Cognition and launched the AI programmer Devin. Today, the company's valuation has reached $48 billion. As the founder with the largest stake, Steven's net worth has reached $5.8 billion (about 38 billion yuan).

At 30, a math prodigy, the youngest billionaire is born

Chinese people seem to have always excelled at math.

Born in 1996, Steven Hao won a silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) at age 17, and the following year won gold alongside Scott Wu (his future business partner), which was also Scott's third IOI gold medal.

What is less known is that Meta's Chief AI Officer and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang was also a competition partner of theirs in their youth. As teenagers, this group of youngsters wrote a wildly imaginative list of startup ideas; the ideas weren't great, but Alexandr actually started a company and made it work. When someone familiar takes the first step, the idea spreads among friends.

After leaving the competition arena, the group went their separate ways. Steven entered MIT, majoring in computer science and mathematics, and during that time interned at Jane Street, Dropbox, Quora and elsewhere. In his graduation year he joined the then-newly founded Scale AI, participating in R&D for image, video and 3D sensor fusion products, and later led technical R&D for the mapping business.

Scott later entered Harvard University, dropped out after two years to start a company. Another old acquaintance from competitions, Walden Yan, is a post-2000s IOI gold medalist who interned at the AI code editor Cursor and later also dropped out of Harvard.

Bessemer Venture Partners official website

The three came back together, again because of programming. After ChatGPT emerged, they wanted to hand a complete development task to AI and see whether it could read the project, modify code and run tests on its own. At the end of 2023, the three set out to found Cognition; the following spring, Devin, billed as the first AI programmer approaching human level, made its debut.

At the time, the demo video quickly went viral on social platforms, and amazement, anxiety and doubt all poured in together. The company said Devin had passed real interviews at multiple AI companies and had completed real orders. Some even dissected the video frame by frame, questioning whether it could handle real and complex code.

All the heated debate did not affect the business. Eighteen months after launch, Devin had entered thousands of companies, and hundreds of thousands of its code changes had been formally adopted.

Having gained a firm foothold, the company began to go on the offensive. In the summer of 2025, competitor Windsurf suddenly ran into trouble: its founder and some core members were poached by Google, and the remaining team's future was uncertain. Cognition sealed the acquisition in just one weekend and brought it under its wing.

In less than three years, the company's annualized revenue exceeded $1 billion, and its valuation reached $48 billion. As the founder with the largest stake, 30-year-old Steven's net worth reached $5.8 billion, making him the youngest member of the 2026 Forbes 400.

Faced with all this, Steven did not respond. In those days, what he talked about on social platforms was still Cognition's new model: "This is our best model yet."

Three years of entrepreneurship, a valuation of 300 billion

"Rarely does an early product let people see the future so clearly." Back in 2024, when Devin was publicly unveiled, early investor Sarah Guo wrote this. She immediately added that she had "never seen such a density of programming talent."

After all, this founding team has won 10 IOI gold medals in total, and the caliber speaks for itself. To this day, Cognition still puts this number in a prominent place on its official website.

At the time, Cognition had just disclosed a $21 million Series A led by Founders Fund, with Stripe founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, as well as Elad Gil, Sarah Guo, Tony Xu and others appearing on the early backer list.

A month later, the company completed a $175 million financing round. Founders Fund continued to lead, and the post-money valuation reached $2 billion, roughly six times higher at once.

By March 2025, Cognition completed a Series B round of several hundred million dollars, with its valuation rising to about $4 billion. 8VC and Lux Capital co-led, with Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Elad Gil and Conviction participating. The specific financing amount was not disclosed.

In September of the same year, Cognition announced more than $400 million in financing, with a post-money valuation of $10.2 billion. Existing shareholders including Lux Capital, 8VC, Neo and Elad Gil continued to follow on, while Bain Capital Ventures, Hanabi Capital and D1 Capital joined for the first time.

An 8VC investor later recalled that at first the company had almost no financial data to measure, and product performance was inconsistent. What ultimately led them to bet was the trust built up over years of knowing the founder.

The bigger question was how much room would be left for the company as large-model companies rolled out coding Agents one after another. 8VC believed that the stronger the model, the longer and more complex the tasks an Agent could take on; the value of context, tool calls and result verification would also rise accordingly. Enterprises would ultimately be willing to pay for "work completed," and that was exactly where Cognition's opportunity lay.

By May 2026, the company announced it had raised more than $1 billion, reaching a valuation of $26 billion, co-led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC. Existing shareholders including Founders Fund, Bain Capital Ventures and Avenir continued to increase their stakes, while new shareholders Ribbit Capital, Atreides and Layer Global joined.

Then in September, Cognition announced a Series E round of more than $2 billion, at a valuation of $48 billion. New shareholders Andreessen Horowitz and Accel led the round, with Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Avenir continuing to participate, and institutions including Benchmark, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock and Lightspeed also joining the shareholder list.

"The speed has completely changed." a16z explained the investment from the perspective of a longer technology cycle: in the past, the speed of software expansion depended on human hands. Next, it will be determined by computing power.

Today, Cognition has more than 200 employees. When it comes to startups, founder Scott Wu still enjoys the challenge, enjoys working with his partners to build something remarkable from scratch. "That's what makes it more fun."

In this year's Forbes Global Billionaires list, 45 AI practitioners appeared for the first time. Worldwide there are now at least 86 AI billionaires, with combined fortunes reaching $2.9 trillion.

More bluntly, a single financing round is enough to rewrite a founder's net worth.

The latest example is AI chip company Olix, which reached a valuation of $3.3 billion after completing a new round of financing. Its 25-year-old founder James Dacombe thus became Europe's youngest self-made billionaire.

AI coding company Lovable also completed a $400 million financing round, with its valuation rising to $13.3 billion, and its two founders' fortunes rising to $3.1 billion accordingly. It had been only eight months since they first joined the ranks of billionaires.

An even greater wealth imagination is extending to the secondary market.

On one side, OpenAI is negotiating a financing round of up to $30 billion to supplement funds for a potential IPO, with a latest pre-money valuation of $1.25 trillion. Anthropic is also preparing for a listing, with a valuation range of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.

On the other side, there is new progress from DeepSeek. It is reported that the company is wrapping up a financing round of about 100 billion RMB and has hired CITIC Securities to assist with listing preparations, planning to list on the STAR Market, with a listing completed as early as 2027.

Beyond enormous wealth, founders are also getting younger and younger.

25-year-old Hong Letong founded Axiom, which completed a $200 million Series A round this year, with a post-money valuation exceeding $1.6 billion; 23-year-old Noah Shinn founded Instinct, which reached a $10 billion valuation in financing within a year of its founding, with only 14 employees; Moxin Technology, founded by Chen Tianrun, a post-2000 PhD student at Zhejiang University, reached a valuation close to 10 billion RMB in its new financing round; and Chen Yuanpei, a post-2000 founder with a Peking University background, raised 2 billion RMB within a year of starting his business...

Technological change always leaves opportunities for a new generation.

This article comes from the WeChat public account "Investment World" (ID: pedaily2012), author: Wang Lu, published by 36Kr with authorization.