Your Mac just got a brain. 🧠
Spec proactively drafts replies, summarizes docs, and helps before you ask. It connects knowledge and memory across iMessage, Slack, email, and your calendar, finally making your apps work together.
Goodbye silos and context switching.
Welcome 2026 Thiel Fellows!
WHO ARE THEY?
Victor Boyd: Birmingham, AL - @VictorWBoyd
Cavalla is on a mission to get anything anywhere in under 5 hours. Starting by building autonomous forklifts, through to developing hypersonic highways.
Samuel Carvalho: Recife, Brazil - @samuelclcc
Praso is building the new infrastructure for wholesale commerce — powering procurement, credit, and workflow tools for SMBs across underserved areas in Brazil.
Nick Dobroshinsky: Sammamish, WA - @NDobroshinsky
EveryTicker is democratizing institutional-grade financial research across the entire U.S. stock market, including the thousands of smaller companies Wall Street ignores.
Ishan Gupta: Kanpur, India - @ishangpta
Juicebox is building an AI recruiter that helps companies make better hiring decisions. Agents that understand real skills and move hiring from guesswork to true meritocracy.
Antoni Kiszka: Strzyżowice, Poland - @antoni_kiszka
Derpetual is building the infrastructure to create a market for any asset — with leverage.
Milan Lustig: Cold Spring Harbor, NY - @HighPriestOfSWO
Opt32 is building modern compute infrastructure to put AI onboard objects in the physical world — from robots to cars and drones.
Galen Mead: Chapel Hill, NC - @g413n
Standard Intelligence is building aligned general learners, pretraining large models to actively explore and learn from the Internet.
Aubrey Niederhoffer: New York, NY - @needaubrey
Swoop is building the super app for Africa, starting with food delivery in Nigeria and expanding into financial services across the continent.
Harry O'Connor: Cork, Ireland - @HarryOC493
Sentient Machines is a research lab building foundational models for robotics that generalize across tasks and environments.
Alex Shieh: Salem, NH - @alexkshieh
The Antifraud Company is a fraud bounty hunter defending American taxpayers with AI and investigative journalism.
Claire Wang: Los Angeles, CA - @clairebookworm
Claire is building biologically accurate simulations of entire nervous systems, starting with C. elegans. Developing a simulated brain that researchers can communicate with helps lay the foundation for brain-computer interface (BCI) technology.
Kyler Wang: Portland, OR - @kylerywang
Action is an artificial intelligence company in stealth.
Introducing Fort, a wearable that automatically tracks strength training.
Strength training is one of the best things you can do for your health and longevity. It deserves better tools.
everyone just keeps building the same thing:
2024: deep research and “operator” (browser clickers)
2025: actual browsers and prompt-to-app
2026: some version of openclaw
there’s a lot of alpha in original product thinking while big labs (and many startups too) are all busy building identical products
I don’t miss being bored. I miss being bored without feeling guilty about it. Now, if you’re not doing something you feel like you’re wasting potential, which is a terrible way to live.