Brandon Wang

Brandon Wang writes on his personal website that he was born in Houston, TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry. He writes that he wrote his first line of PHP in second grade, and he credits much of his early curiosity to open-source software and the openness of the Internet: “I credit so much early curiosity to open-source software and the accessibility of the Internet.”⁠[1]

He writes on his personal website that his earliest professional work was in education reform and technology: “I made a popular online academic planner and was the youngest employee in Teach For America history.”⁠[1]

He writes on his personal website that he holds a high school diploma from Phillips Exeter AcademyPhillips Exeter AcademyPhillips Exeter Academy is a private, coeducational boarding and day college-preparatory school for grades 9–12 in Exeter, New Hampshire, United States. It was founded in 1781 by John Phillips and his wife, Elizabeth, opened in 1783, is known for the Harkness method of teaching around a discussion table, and has admitted girls since 1970.Open the full entry, which he attended on full financial aid.⁠[1]

He writes on his personal website that he studied computer science at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, where he helped write the new computer science curriculum, before dropping out, leaving him with “an incomplete BA/MA from Harvard.”⁠[1]

A 2024 alumni profile by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences states that he and Athena Kan had been classmates in CS50 and later co-founded Dreambound together.⁠[2]

He writes on his personal website that in 2015 he co-authored a book on breaking down age barriers.⁠[1]

He writes on his personal website that he is a 2018 Interact Fellow.⁠[1]

He writes on his personal website that he founded Conduit Analytics and served as its chief executive, that the company used AI to build “at-scale relationship graphs,” and that it was acquired in 2019; the site does not name the acquirer.⁠[1]

On December 30, 2020 the Thiel Foundation named the 24 members of the 2020 class of Thiel Fellows. The list, in the format “Name: Hometown, Current Location,” gives a single location for him, “San Francisco, CA.” The announcement describes his project as Dreambound, which provides low-income Americans with planning tools and financing for workforce training courses, starting with a certified nursing assistant (CNA) program. It also states that during the two-year program fellows receive $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology founders, investors and scientists.⁠[3]

He describes himself on his personal website as a 2020 Thiel Fellow, and the 2025 Fortune and VentureBeat articles on AIUC also call him a Thiel Fellow.⁠[1][4][5]

He writes on his personal website that he was a 2021 ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry 30 Under 30 recipient.⁠[1]

He writes on his personal website that he was director of product and “hire #1” at StratoDem Analytics, a real-estate data science services company, and that StratoDem was acquired by Altus Group in 2021. The site does not give the years of his time there.⁠[1]

On July 23, 2025 the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) emerged from stealth. Fortune and VentureBeat both call Rune Kvist AIUC’s co-founder and chief executive; a Fortune photo caption calls him AIUC’s co-founder and chief technology officer and Rajiv Dattani a co-founder, and VentureBeat calls him a co-founder. The photo caption of an Upstarts Media article names him, the chief executive Rune Kvist and Rajiv Dattani as AIUC’s co-founders, and its text calls him and Rajiv Dattani Kvist’s co-founders.⁠[4][5][6]

The two articles describe his earlier work slightly differently: Fortune calls him “a Thiel Fellow who previously founded a consumer underwriting business,” and VentureBeat “a Thiel Fellow who previously built consumer underwriting businesses.”⁠[4][5]

Of the other two co-founders, VentureBeat writes that Rune Kvist was AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry’s first product and go-to-market hire in early 2022, and Fortune writes that Rajiv Dattani was a McKinseyMcKinsey & CompanyMcKinsey & Company is a management consulting firm headquartered in New York, United States. It was founded in Chicago in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey and, after Marvin Bower established its “professional service” principles, grew into one of the largest pure consulting firms in the world; as of October 2026 it has more than 100 offices in over 50 countries and about 40,000 employees. It has also repeatedly faced regulatory investigations and public criticism over episodes such as its work with Enron, a former leader’s insider trading case, and its consulting for opioid manufacturers.Open the full entry partner who led work in the global insurance sector and served as chief operating officer of METR, a research nonprofit that evaluated OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s and Anthropic’s models before deployment.⁠[5][4]

AIUC announced on the same day a $15 million seed round led by Nat FriedmanNat FriedmanNat Friedman is an entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Ximian and later Xamarin with Miguel de Icaza and was chief executive of GitHub from 2018 to 2021; after GitHub he invested in artificial intelligence companies with Daniel Gross, instigated the Vesuvius Challenge to read the Herculaneum scrolls, and in 2025 joined Meta to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs with Alexandr Wang.Open the full entry through his firm NFDG, with participation from Emergence CapitalEmergence CapitalEmergence Capital is a US venture capital firm founded in 2003 by Gordon Ritter, Jason Green and Brian Jacobs. It focuses on early-stage enterprise software and cloud services, with investments including Salesforce, Veeva, Zoom and Crunchbase, and has expanded its focus to AI software and services.Open the full entry and Terrain. Fortune writes that the notable angels taking part included the Anthropic co-founder Ben MannBen MannBen Mann (Benjamin Mann) is a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic. He previously worked at OpenAI on infrastructure, efficiency, and safety for GPT-3 and is one of the authors of the GPT-3 paper; as of 2026 he works on Anthropic’s Labs team, which incubates experimental products.Open the full entry and former chief information security officers of Google Cloud and MongoDBMongoDBMongoDB, Inc. is a New York-based database software company that develops the document database of the same name and sells it as the cloud-hosted service MongoDB Atlas, the self-managed commercial edition MongoDB Enterprise Advanced and the free Community Server. Formerly called 10gen, the company listed on Nasdaq in 2017 under the symbol MDB.Open the full entry; Upstarts Media lists Geoff Ralston, a former president of Y Combinator, among the backers as well.⁠[4][5][6]

Fortune writes that AIUC set out to build the insurance, audit and certification infrastructure needed to bring AI agents safely into the enterprise world, offering standards, audits and liability coverage, and that it introduced AIUC-1, a risk and safety framework designed specifically for AI agents. VentureBeat writes that AIUC-1 covers six categories, safety, security, reliability, accountability, data privacy and societal risks, and that Rune Kvist calls it “SOC 2 for AI agents”; AIUC was then working with the unicorn startups Ada (customer support) and Cognition (coding).⁠[4][5]

As of November 2026 his personal website states in the past tense that he co-founded AIUC and was its chief technology officer, where he wrote the AIUC-1 AI safety, security and reliability standard, and that he is “currently working on something new.” The site describes him as an entrepreneur, engineering leader and optimist and says that he now lives in San Francisco, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

He writes on his personal website that his advising and investing interests are AI safety; businesses creating developer, product and infrastructure tools for AI; underwriting and fintech; and businesses that use design for leverage.⁠[1]

A 2024 alumni profile by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences states that after graduating Athena Kan co-founded Dreambound with her former CS50 classmate Brandon Wang and the Harvard Graduate School of Education graduate Shiroy Aspandiar, with her as chief executive and him as chief technology officer, and that she frequently works on the product with him; it says that thanks to SEAS the two share the same technological background and language, which makes it easier for the company to keep growing.⁠[2]

The profile describes Dreambound as an online platform that helps people start new careers by connecting them with degree and certificate programs; Athena Kan says it serves everyone but that most of its users are adults who feel a little lost in their lives, and people looking to change careers use it to search for the right education. The company initially tried to match customers with companies that would pay for their certification in exchange for a work commitment: its first career pipeline paid for certified nursing assistant certification for a small registration fee and then placed the customer in a job at a partner company, which the customer had to accept; to get started, Athena Kan called every training provider she could until one agreed to partner. By 2024, the article says, hundreds of thousands of people looking for education came to Dreambound each month and were connected with more than 300 partner schools and universities.⁠[2]

He writes on his personal website that Dreambound is “the #1 search engine for career education” and was previously the issuer and underwriter of new ways to help Americans pay for vocational training.⁠[1]

Personal website: https://brandon.wang/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Dreambound: Official website: https://dreambound.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]