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Two Cambridge graduates are due a £174 million windfall after Microsoft paid out for their artificial intelligence-powered predictive keyboard.
SwiftKey founders Jon Reynolds and Dr Ben Medlock were in their 20s when they launched the speedy-typing Android keyboard which is one of the best-selling apps in the world.
Here are seven other tech whizz-kids who have made a fortune from their success at an early age.
London-born D’Aloisio became one of the world’s youngest self-made multi-millionaires when he sold news reading app Summly to Yahoo in a deal rumoured to be worth £19 million. D’Aloisio was just 15 when the app launched and fast attracted investment worth more than £1 million before selling to Yahoo in 2013. He left Yahoo in 2015 to focus on his studies at Oxford.
Zuckerberg recently became Forbes’ fifth wealthiest man in the world after a successful few months for Facebook. He famously launched the social media network from his Harvard dorm room aged just 19 and has built an empire on the back of its success. The 31-year-old is now firmly one of the most important men in Silicon Valley and the wider tech world.
The former Stanford student co-founded Snapchat in 2011 aged just 21 with classmate Bobby Murphy. Around 100 million people per day use the photo and video sharing app and Spiegel remains as its CEO after he rejected a £2 billion buyout offer from Facebook in 2013. The company is reportedly valued at about £11 billion now, although it has also lost a string of executives over the past year rumoured to be related to Spiegel’s leadership style.
The Irish brothers founded start-up Auctomatic and sold it for £3.3 million in 2008. The two had been on the entrepreneurial trail since they were teenagers, with Patrick winning the Young Scientist of the Year prize in 2005 and John scoring the highest-ever mark by a student for the Irish Leaving Certificate. In 2010, aged 22 and 20 respectively, they founded their current venture, Stripe, an online payments processing company recently valued at £1.2 billion. The product’s success has been further fuelled by partnerships with both Visa and Apple.
One of the first whizz-kids to take advantage of the web was 12-year-old Hadfield, who in 1994, alongside his father Greg, founded Soccernet – a sports-based website which was bought by ESPN in 1999 for £27 million. Hadfield later founded Schoolsnet, one of the UK’s leading online education websites, and is now the CEO of Buy With Fetch which helps to make purchases on an Apple Watch.
The Spotify founder was 24 when he launched the music streaming service after years of searching for a way to get people to pay for music online. The Swedish programmer and entrepreneur founded his first company in 1997 at the age of 14 before launching Spotify in 2008, with the service now worth a reported £5.8 billion with a user base of more than 75 million people.
Tumblr founder Karp started the short-form blogging site in 2007 aged 26 and was handed a substantial windfall six years later when Yahoo bought the site for £750 million. Karp launched the site from his mother’s apartment in New York and gained 75,000 users in the first fortnight. Since 2013, user numbers have fallen with seven million visitors dropping off the site in the first year of Yahoo’s ownership.
