AI founders take 13 of 47 spots on Sunday Times 40 Under 40 Rich List

TL;DR:

• AI startup founders account for 13 of the 47 individuals named on the 2026 Sunday Times 40 Under 40 Rich List, with the cohort holding combined wealth of £26.2 billion.
• ElevenLabs co-founders Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski (both 31) share third place at £1.33bn each, with the synthetic-voice company now valued at £8.1bn — three times its valuation 12 months ago.
• Wayve founder Alex Kendall takes ninth at £584m, with Wayve recently raising over $1.5bn at a $9bn valuation and signing a UK government contract this week.

The compilation is striking for two reasons. First, the AI cohort is concentrated in London — ElevenLabs, Wayve, Improbable, Synthesia, and Cleo are all London-headquartered, reinforcing the King’s Cross AI-cluster narrative the FT mapped this week. Second, 34 of the 40 entries built their fortunes themselves rather than inheriting them, and the named founders have collectively generated over 15,500 jobs according to the latest accounts cited by The Sunday Times.

Who is on the list

Beyond ElevenLabs at third, the list features Herman Narula of Improbable (10th), Amar Shah of Wayve (18th), Synthesia co-founders Victor Riparbelli and Steffen Tjerrild (joint 25th at £192m each — up from £110m last year), and Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo (30th). The list is topped, as in recent years, by the Duke of Westminster at £9.68bn — but the inherited-wealth top spot looks increasingly out of step with the self-made AI cohort beneath it.

UK angle: a cluster signal, not a sovereignty signal

The AI-heavy list is genuinely an indicator of British AI sector momentum, but with the same caveat the FT raised this week: Phoenix Court’s Saul Klein noted that of the $2bn in later-stage capital his UK portfolio is about to raise, only 10% is coming from UK investors. ElevenLabs is a British-Polish-founded London company backed substantially by US capital. Wealth created in the UK does not automatically equal capital captured in the UK.

Looking forward

The compounding question is whether the 2027 and 2028 editions will see this AI cohort move further up. ElevenLabs’ triple-in-12-months valuation surge is the bellwether — if that pattern holds in inference-cost startups like Doubleword and chip companies like Fractile (which closed a £165m Series B this week at a £751m valuation), the UK AI list will displace fashion and sport from the top of the under-40 wealth tables within two years.