The man poised to become one of the world’s youngest artificial intelligence billionaires began his entrepreneurial journey as a bored preteen living in Los Angeles.
When Ali Ansari was 12, living with his family in a single room at his aunt’s house in Woodland Hills, his immigrant mother told him to stop wasting time looking at his phone and trying to make money from it.
He took his father’s moccasins and put them up for sale on eBay for $50.
“My dad used to say to me, ‘Why the hell did you sell my shoes?’ “, Ansari said. “My mother was excited.”
Even though it was a bad deal for his father, Ansari discovered the joy of making money. He has been pursuing it ever since.
He began riding his bike around his neighborhood, visiting garage sales and thrift stores, buying whatever he could carry to sell online.
Through middle school, high school and college in California, he continued building online businesses, launching an AI company in his 20s that could make him a billionaire this year, his 25th.
Ali Ansari generates the training data that makes AI models like ChatGPT and Claude smarter.
(Paul Kuroda/For Time)
His hard work during his youth paid off more than he could have imagined. Success gave him the freedom to buy his parents a house and a nice car. He has made headlines and is recognized by people in the industry.
But the main change from his success so far, he says, is a huge increase in the amount of work and responsibilities he has to take on.
“I feel very grateful and very stressed,” he said. “That kind of sums it up.”
Ansari’s AI company is called Micro1. Making AI smarter requires large amounts of data, as well as training and testing. Micro1 recruits and manages thousands of human experts (coders, lawyers, doctors, professors, and financial analysts) to gather expert insights that power AI models like ChatGPT. These experts review and correct the AI results, making them more accurate.
Micro1 is a leading provider of this type of expert human assistance for AI, alongside its California-based competitors Scale AI, Surge and Mercor.
Micro1 went from $4 million in annualized revenue in 2024 to $200 million today, according to Ansari. Even by Silicon Valley standards, this is a meteoric rise.
Forbes estimates that Ansari is on the verge of becoming a billionaire, based on ongoing financing discussions that value Micro1 at $2.5 billion. Micro1 was last valued at $500 million.
Ansari has a booming voice, a fashionable buzz cut, and a meticulously maintained beard. He’s quick with his fingers, usually responding to texts immediately despite everything he’s juggling. He has the confidence of an older person, although his frequent use of the word “like” in conversations marks him as Gen Z.
His startup is based in Palo Alto, and during monthly visits to Los Angeles, he works out of a coworking space in Woodland Hills — just minutes from his family, his high school, and the memories of his many teenage activities.
Ali Ansari is the co-founder of Micro1, a company that recruits and manages thousands of human experts to help train AI.
(Paul Kuroda/For Time)
“This area represents my whole childhood,” he said, gesturing out the window from his Woodland Hills office during an interview at the coworking space.
Ansari’s family emigrated to the United States when he was 10, after winning the rare U.S. green card lottery. Before moving, they lived a comfortable life in a small seaside town in northern Iran, where his father owned a kitchen cabinet factory.
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has experienced multiple waves of middle-class exodus, where Iranian immigrants settled in the United States to escape economic collapse and persecution. The growing presence of the Persian diaspora in Westwood has earned it the nickname Tehrangeles.
The family of four shared a single room at a relative’s house for the first year. Her mother took a job at Target for a short time. The transition was difficult for Ansari, who did not speak English fluently and often got into trouble while messing around at school.
“Teachers would call my mom and they would say, ‘Hey, your son is making cow noises again’ or something,” he said.
At age 14, he started reselling textbooks because they were easier to carry in his backpack. He realized that it was difficult to get a regular supply of books through garage sales, so he developed Cash books nowa website for students to sell their textbooks. He would list them on Amazon at a 50% markup.
Buying and selling school textbooks became his obsession. His bedroom wall was divided into two sections: “unlisted” and “listed” to keep track of the inventory. By age 16, Ansari had sold more than $100,000 worth of books.
“I would focus more on that than school,” he said. “It was like the main hustle.”
In high school, he started a tutoring business which he later sold. In 2019, Ansari enrolled at UC Berkeley and launched a software agency to create websites for small businesses.
Hiring engineers to build the websites was taking up too much of his time, so he created an AI screening tool to help him with interviews. This later became Micro1, and its selection tool was used to track down, eliminate, and test all kinds of experts for AI training.
However, the path to success was not without pitfalls. After raising $2 million in 2023, Ansari had a panic attack during a trip to visit his team in India.
“I kept repeating this idea in my head that some people had decided to give me millions of dollars,” he said. “And now I have a duty to really do something good with this.”
He got through it with help from his family and reading, and has now matured enough to manage his anxiety and lead with confidence.
“I’m calmer than ever and I honestly feel less anxious than ever,” he said.
Micro1’s annualized revenue grew more than 30-fold last year to $150 million. At the start of 2026, it exceeded $200 million.
It has built a global workforce of entrepreneurs with diverse skills, from coders and actors to doctors and lawyers, to teach their skills to AI.
Ansari says running such a fast-growing company, in the heart of the hottest tech sector, feels like a constant battle trying to keep up with demand, raise money and “fight back” against competitors trying to poach his employees.
He says he has no hobbies outside of work. He doesn’t watch TV or movies but he devours business podcasts and the personal stories of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk.
Ansari is still adjusting to his new fame and responsibilities. As the company’s valuation increased, Ansari bought his family a house in Woodland Hills. He recently hired a chief of staff to help him with family and business matters.
“I’m constantly choosing what I spend my time on, and that’s become the hardest thing,” he said.
For future growth, Ansari is betting that demand for human training data will increase. It recently expanded Micro1 into robotics, recruiting about 1,000 people in 60 countries to record footage of themselves performing household chores. The images will be used to train robotic systems.
Ansari predicts that in the long term, human data will become a A 1,000 billion dollar market — a projection he derives from the assumption that about 5% of all human work will ultimately be redirected to training AI systems.
During a recent visit home, his father told him he should branch out into robots. When Ansari told him that Micro1 had already started doing this, his father complained.
The man whose slacker started an empire wanted a piece of the action this time.
“You stole my idea,” his father joked. “You have to give me equity.”
The young Ansari hopes his success will uplift more than just his family.
“I could (become) the youngest Persian billionaire in the world,” he said. “I think I’m going to inspire a lot of other Iranians, which is a bit strange to say.”