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‘Not an IITian, not an MIT grad’: Founder shares how a 19-year-old built ₹1 crore a month AI venture
A founder shared the journey of Ayush Singh, a 19-year-old self-taught AI engineer who did not have elite credentials or financial privilege.
A social media post about a young entrepreneur earning around ₹1 crore a month through his AI-focused venture has gone viral online, drawing admiration as well as envy from social media users. Taking to LinkedIn, Topmate co-founder and CTO Dinesh Singh shared the journey of Ayush Singh, a 19-year-old self-taught AI engineer who did not have elite credentials or financial privilege.
“He’s not an IITian, not an MIT grad, and wasn’t born with a silver spoon,” Dinesh Singh wrote in the post, which later surfaced on X and gained widespread attention.
The founder shared that Ayush was just 13 when the Covid-19 pandemic pushed his family into a financial crisis. Armed with “outdated courses, a patchy internet, a laptop, and a ridiculous amount of curiosity,” he taught himself machine learning, the post read.
Singh claimed that within months, Ayush’s efforts paid off as he began working with startups abroad. By the age of 14, one of his courses was even publicly recommended by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.
Singh said that over the years, Ayush went on to write natural language processing (NLP) systems for a US startup, worked as an MLOps engineer and data scientist, founded Antern, and co-founded Second Brain Labs. “By every measure, Ayush had made it,” Singh wrote.
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But despite the accomplishments, one challenge remained. “Today, he's teaching AI to hundreds of engineers across India, helping them land the kind of work that once felt out of reach.” However, according to Singh, teaching itself wasn’t paying enough.
“What was missing was packaging, positioning, and a system to sell it. That is the part Topmate helped build,” he wrote, adding that Ayush now earns around ₹1 crore every month through premium cohorts hosted on the platform.
Singh said the story reflects a larger trend in the creator economy. “Just like Ayush, most creators are sitting on something people would gladly pay to learn, and almost none of them earn a rupee from it,” he wrote.
“Ayush was sitting on a fortune he couldn't see. You might be too,” he added.
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Social media reacts
The post quickly went viral online.
Reacting to it, one user wrote, “My 28-year-old self is feeling jealous and depressed seeing so many kids achieve so much at such a young age.”
“This is so inspiring,” commented another. “Unreal,” remarked a third user.
