Who is Ali Ansari, the Forbes-highlighted 24-year-old billionaire who built a $1 billion empire in eight months?
The Magazine Forbes highlighted a young man 24 years, Ali Ansarifor his meteoric career in the technological world. The renowned publication reported on the history of his company, Micro1that started as university entrepreneurship and in eight months it reached an estimated value of 2.5 billion dollars.
Ansari is the CEO and founder of the company specializing in this field Data processing with artificial intelligence (AI). “We are the artificial intelligence platform for human intelligence; we select and select highly qualified talent in various fields such as engineering and medicine.” We support state-of-the-art laboratories in training their models” is how he defines himself on the micro1 website.
Just as Forbes recently recognized Luana Lopes Lara, the “youngest billionaire in the world” with a net worth of $1.3 billion, which she earned on her own – without inheritance or previous assets – they claim in the article dedicated to Ansari that he could be next if his company continues to grow at the same dizzying pace.
Ali Ansari’s decision to turn micro1’s AI recruiting assistant into a data labeling company sent the company’s valuation soaring from $80 million to $2.5 billion. Now he is working on conquering the market for humanoid training data. https://t.co/0JfN16WwYi
📸: micro1 pic.twitter.com/TBtniRkFqx
—Forbes (@Forbes) December 4, 2025
According to estimates Ansari has a 42% stake in the company worth $2.5 billion, so His net worth is estimated at $1 billion..
He emigrated to the USA without knowing English and almost dropped out of his studies: Who is Ali Ansari?
Ansari came out Iranhis home country USAwhen he was 10 years old and settled into a studio apartment with his family of four.
““I didn’t know a word of English, I was suspended twice in elementary school and I couldn’t graduate from high school,” he said in a post on his LinkedIn account. where he revealed his life story.
“I took the initiative and decided to change my life in my freshman year of high school. I was fortunate to make the decision at the right time; I got excellent gradesI founded two companies through self-funded startups, I sold the first one and used the money to go to university“he said.
Ali Ansari lives in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, the headquarters of his company “micro1”. (Photo: LinkedIn)He started studying for a double degree Mathematics and Computer Engineering in the UC Berkeley. “When I was a junior at Berkeley, I was on the verge of giving up everythingbut I decided to only study computer science instead of computer science and mathematics and that was another great decision,” he confessed.
“I think it’s always better to finish something or part of it than to give up,” he stressed. “I say this for reflection, for my own good and to humbly acknowledge my successes in recent years and to convey to you that life can really change in a short period of time. Keep going!” he commented when 10 years had passed since his emigration.
His first venture was CashBooksNowa platform for reselling books for university students, and with this experience he decided to create another platform, this time for math tutoring for students.
“My friends and I started tutoring classmates who were preparing for math Olympiads, and it eventually turned into an online math tutoring platform with very good profits, and that was the first small business I sold,” he revealed.
Ali Ansari on a trip to Türkiye, where he hired more employees: He founded a global team with a presence in six countries. (Photo: LinkedIn)The start of his million-dollar business began in his first year as a university student. Micro1 was born as a software development agency in one of its practical jobs and had the intention of becoming one Smart recruitersupports the company in selecting employees.
He used OpenAI’s GPT-3 model to create an AI-based recruiter that speaks to candidates and assesses their skills for him. Then he perfected and adjusted it a thousand times.
The revolution of Micro1the company founded by Ari Ansari
His company grew from a simple AI recruiting assistant into one Labeling and data verification company. When annual sales exceeded one million dollars, it was presented at several investor roundtables and attracted the attention of investment groups, which contributed large amounts of capital.
“Micro1’s value went from $80 million to $2.5 billion in just eight months,” the young man revealed. At the beginning of the year they had sales of $7 million a year, and now they’re surpassing it $100 million in annual revenue.
“Data is the oxygen of AI models. “Data sets are shaping the way AI powers, adapts and integrates the future of humanity,” he said, explaining the company’s changing focus.
I’m pleased to announce that micro1 has raised $35 million in Series A funding, giving us a valuation of $500 million. This round was co-led by 01A @adambain Join our board.
We are grateful to partner with leading AI labs and Fortune 10 companies like Microsoft to train LLMs at the frontier.
We are simply… pic.twitter.com/u2GY2RGp7J
— Ali Ansari (@aliniikk) September 12, 2025
Ansari envisioned a promising future in the market for trusted data providers, at least in the short term. “For AI models to become smarter, they need people to add context and meaning to the information they are trained on.” specified in the dialogue Forbes.
Investors feared that data labeling would become obsolete once AI reached artificial general intelligence (AGI) and rivaled human cognitive abilities thanks to its ability to self-learn and continually improve.
However, Ansari doubts this claim. It is committed to the essence of its project: “People always come first,” which puts the creativity and unique authenticity of each person above any technology.
“Labelling and verifying data was initially very easy, but now it’s literally about discovery People who are smarter than models and that makes it more complex,” he explained.
“Even if these creatures become much more intelligent than all humans combined, they must continue to learn from them. People value changeand the only way to ensure it is consistent with those values is to continue to learn from them,” he said.
He also spoke about the criticism he received because the workers his company hired – all experts in different fields – were in training the AI that could one day replace them.
“The current AI entertainment market is in full growth and will create a huge sector of jobs, especially in the advanced humanoid robotics industry, where a lot of data testing is still needed,” he argued.
Micro1 is already supplying equipment sets, including Meta’s Rayban glasses, to people creating data sets critical to building robots.
The proposal may seem unusual, but it is real: Paid participants must record themselves while doing various everyday tasks: making the bed, fixing a leaky faucet or washing the dishes. “Hopefully one day humanoid robots will do even half of what we do,” he says.
One of the current customers using the services of Ansari’s company is none other than the giant Microsoft. “Beyond the development and growth of micro1, our entire global team is focused on one existential question that drives all of our projects: Where should humanity invest its time?” concluded the young billionaire.