The business leaders on the 2026 TIME100 Next list

Influence no longer waits for seniority, and the 2026 TIME100 Next list is built on that premise. TIME started the franchise in 2019 as a counterpart to its flagship TIME100, which mostly honors people already running the institutions they appear in. TIME100 Next works differently. It names 100 rising figures across entertainment, sports, politics, science and business who are still mid-climb. Many are founders scaling companies through a first real inflection point. Others are executives taking on operational responsibility at firms growing faster than their org charts.

The business and technology cohort in the 2026 edition tracks where capital and attention sit right now. Regulated prediction markets are represented by Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara. The AI boom shows up twice: through Michael Truell of Anysphere, the company behind the coding tool Cursor, and Brendan Foody of Mercor. Mercor supplies the expert human labor that AI labs use to train and evaluate their models. Fintech built for specific regional markets appears through Hosam Arab of Tabby in the Gulf and Tosin Eniolorunda of Moniepoint in Nigeria. Eniolorunda's list tribute was written by the Nigerian banker Tony Elumelu. Private spaceflight, data security, crypto exchange operations and luxury resale round out the group.

What links most of these honorees is recency. Several lead companies that did not exist 10 years ago, and a few that barely existed five years ago. Kalshi became a mainstream name only once its election and sports contracts drew national attention. Mercor was founded in 2023 around a category of work that did not exist in its current form before generative AI. Skyroot Aerospace sent India's first privately developed rocket toward space in 2022.

This slideshow profiles 10 business leaders named to the 2026 TIME100 Next list. Each slide covers the executive's role, what the company actually does and why the work drew wider notice. TIME plans to celebrate the full list on October 29 at its sixth annual TIME100 Next gathering in Manhattan.

Illustration: Quartz

Michael Truell is co-founder and chief executive of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, an AI-assisted code editor that ranks among the most widely adopted tools in professional software development. Cursor puts model-generated suggestions, edits and debugging inside the environment where engineers already write code, rather than in a separate chat window.

Truell founded Anysphere in 2022 with a small group of collaborators he met at MIT. The bet was narrow rather than broad. Instead of another general-purpose assistant, they built an editor designed from the start for AI-assisted programming, competing directly with Microsoft $MSFT's GitHub Copilot in a category Microsoft had defined. That focus drew engineering teams at early-stage startups and at larger technology firms shortening their development cycles.

Anysphere's growth has been fast even by software industry standards. The company assembled a large base of paying subscribers within a few years of launch and raised successive funding rounds that carried its valuation into the billions of dollars. Investors treat it as a test case for how quickly an AI product can convert into revenue once it solves a specific, expensive problem for professionals willing to pay for the time saved.

The shift Cursor represents goes beyond autocomplete. Earlier developer tools suggested the next line of code. Cursor and its rivals generate, refactor and repair larger blocks with limited line-by-line human review. That has opened an argument inside the software industry about what a programmer's job becomes when the writing is partly automated and reviewing turns into the core skill. Truell sits near the middle of that debate, both as a commercial force and as a reference point in it.

His place on the 2026 TIME100 Next list reflects the recognition AI tooling companies drew this year, as the technology moved out of lab demonstrations and into the daily routine of corporate engineering teams.

Illustration: Quartz

Tarek Mansour is co-founder and chief executive of Kalshi, a U.S. exchange where people trade contracts tied to the outcome of real-world events. Kalshi operates under Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversight, which separates it from offshore betting sites and unregulated prediction platforms.

Mansour started the company in 2018 and spent years in the federal approval process before Kalshi could list a single contract. The CFTC granted it designated contract market status, a license category normally held by commodity futures venues rather than consumer-facing apps. That slow path became the company's main competitive asset.

Kalshi's breakout came during the 2024 U.S. election cycle, when its political contracts drew heavy volume and were widely cited as a real-time read on expected outcomes, distinct from traditional polling. Traders buying and selling contracts on an election result produced continuously updating prices, and news coverage treated those prices as a parallel signal to survey data.

The company then moved into contracts tied to sporting events, which drew pushback from state gaming regulators. They argued the products function as sports wagering and fall under state licensing rules. Mansour has argued the opposite: that federal commodities regulation preempts state gambling law for contracts listed on a CFTC-designated exchange. That question has moved through courts and regulatory proceedings, and the outcome will shape what the category can legally offer.

Venture investors have backed Kalshi at rising valuations as volume climbed across both political and sports markets.

Mansour frames the business as price discovery rather than gambling, comparing event contracts to the way futures markets price oil or interest rates. The framing matters commercially, since it underpins the legal case for federal jurisdiction. His place on the 2026 TIME100 Next list reflects how quickly event trading moved from a regulatory curiosity to a product with mainstream volume and mainstream legal scrutiny.

Illustration: Quartz

Luana Lopes Lara is chief operating officer of Kalshi, the event-contract exchange she started in 2018 with Tarek Mansour. The platform turns questions about elections, economic data and sports results into tradable contracts, and it only functions because the compliance apparatus underneath it holds up against steady legal pressure.

Lopes Lara grew up in Brazil, where she trained as a ballet dancer before studying computer science at MIT and meeting Mansour. The pair wagered that ordinary people would trade on real-world questions if a federally supervised venue existed for it. Reaching that point meant years of filings, legal argument and engineering work. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission designated Kalshi a contract market in 2020, and public trading followed the next year.

That sequence shaped the company she now oversees. A consumer fintech app can launch first and sort out licensing afterward. A federally regulated exchange cannot. Trade surveillance, settlement rules, customer fund handling and reporting duties all had to be in place before any scale arrived, and holding them together through growth is the operating job.

Kalshi's move into sports contracts changed the shape of that work. Volume now arrives in concentrated bursts around scheduled events — an election night, a championship game — instead of flowing evenly day to day. The systems have to absorb those peaks and settle every contract correctly, and headcount has to grow fast enough to keep pace.

Lawsuits and cease-and-desist orders from state gaming regulators add another layer. Each contested jurisdiction raises practical questions: who can trade, how users get verified, which records the company must produce and on what timeline. Those answers fall to operations as much as to lawyers.

Her selection for the 2026 TIME100 Next list reflects that side of Kalshi — the compliance and infrastructure work that keeps a contested financial product trading while courts and regulators argue over it.

Illustration: Quartz

Hosam Arab is co-founder and chief executive of Tabby, the buy-now-pay-later company that lets shoppers across Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and nearby markets split purchases into interest-free installments at checkout. Founded in 2019, Tabby has become one of the most valuable fintech firms to emerge from the Middle East.

Arab came to the business from retail rather than banking. He previously co-founded and ran Namshi, a Gulf fashion e-commerce site. That background shaped Tabby's approach. Rather than pitch consumers directly, the company built into merchant checkout flows, signing regional retailers and international brands that sell in the Gulf so the installment option appears at the point of purchase.

The product landed in a market where credit card penetration has trailed the U.S. and Western Europe, and where cash on delivery long dominated online shopping. Installment payments gave younger, smartphone-first consumers a credit-like option without a traditional card, and adoption tracked the wider expansion of Gulf e-commerce.

Tabby has since widened its scope beyond installments. The company runs a shopping app and a card product alongside other consumer financial services, moving it closer to everyday banking than to a single payments feature. It has also deepened its corporate presence in Saudi Arabia, the region's largest consumer market and the center of its growth.

Regulation moved alongside that growth. Financial authorities in Saudi Arabia and the UAE introduced supervisory frameworks covering buy-now-pay-later providers as the category scaled. Tabby pursued formal licensing rather than operating in the gaps, a choice that preserved its merchant relationships as scrutiny of short-term consumer credit tightened.

Successive venture rounds have valued the company in the billions of dollars, drawing investors from the Gulf, the U.S. and Asia. Arab's place on the 2026 TIME100 Next list reflects a business built for the payment habits and economics of its own region rather than copied from a Western template.

Illustration: Quartz

Pawan Kumar Chandana is co-founder and chief executive of Skyroot Aerospace, the Hyderabad-based firm that launched the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach space. Its Vikram-S vehicle flew a suborbital mission in November 2022, a flight Skyroot named Prarambh, the Sanskrit word for beginning.

Chandana worked as an engineer at the Indian Space Research Organisation before leaving in 2018 to start Skyroot with Naga Bharath Daka, another former ISRO engineer. The two built the company around small-lift launch vehicles, a segment aimed at operators of compact satellites who want a dedicated ride rather than a secondary slot on a much larger rocket. The Vikram line is named for Vikram Sarabhai, the physicist regarded as the founder of India's space program.

India opened its space sector to private participation in 2020 and created IN-SPACe, a nodal agency that authorizes commercial launch activity and brokers access to ISRO facilities and expertise. Skyroot was among the earliest companies to use that framework, signing agreements that let it test hardware at government sites while developing its own propulsion systems and composite structures.

The Vikram-S flight carried payloads on a brief suborbital trajectory rather than placing anything in orbit. Its purpose was to validate avionics, telemetry and propulsion technologies that Skyroot intends to use on Vikram-1, the orbital vehicle designed to carry satellites to low Earth orbit. Reaching orbit is a far harder engineering problem than reaching space, and that step remains the company's central objective.

Skyroot has drawn backing from Indian and international investors, including Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC, which led a funding round in 2022. The capital supports a business case tied to rising demand for Earth observation and communications satellites, much of it from customers who would otherwise book launches in the U.S. or Europe. Chandana's place on the 2026 TIME100 Next list reflects how quickly India's launch market has shifted from state monopoly to open competition.

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Cyera, the data security company Yotam Segev co-founded in 2021 and now leads as chief executive, builds software that finds and classifies sensitive information scattered across a company's cloud systems. The security industry calls this category data security posture management, and Cyera became one of its best-funded players within a few years of launch.

Segev started the company with Tamar Bar-Ilan after serving in Israeli military intelligence, a common route into the country's cybersecurity sector. The product targets a problem that grew as enterprises spread workloads across several cloud providers at once. Few large organizations can say with confidence where their customer records, financial data and proprietary files actually sit, or which employees and applications can reach them. Without that inventory, compliance with privacy rules such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation becomes guesswork.

Cyera scans cloud environments, identifies what kind of data each store holds and flags exposure — a file of personal information open to the entire company, say, or regulated records sitting in a system never meant to hold them. It works above individual cloud platforms rather than replacing firewalls, endpoint tools or identity systems.

Investors moved quickly. Cyera raised several large rounds in close succession and reached a valuation in the billions of dollars. Accel and Sequoia Capital are among its backers. Demand has come largely from big enterprises in regulated industries, where mishandled personal data now carries regulatory penalties on top of breach cleanup costs.

Generative AI sharpened the pitch. Companies feeding internal documents into AI assistants and retrieval systems need to know what sits in those repositories before a model surfaces something to the wrong employee. A chatbot with access to an unclassified file share can hand a junior staffer salary data or legal records in seconds.

Segev's place on the 2026 TIME100 Next list reflects how data security has separated from general network defense into its own well-capitalized field.

Illustration: Quartz

Brendan Foody co-founded Mercor in 2023 and runs it as chief executive. The marketplace supplies AI labs with the skilled contractors who evaluate, annotate and help train their models. Instead of recruiting generic data labelers, Mercor places domain specialists — software engineers, physicians, attorneys, finance professionals — into the specific technical work a lab needs done.

Foody started the company with two college friends and left school to build it full time. Their bet was that frontier model development would move away from scraping ever-larger piles of internet text and toward paying qualified people to produce and grade expert-level material. Labs did move that way. As systems were pushed into reasoning, coding and professional judgment tasks, the caliber of the humans doing the reinforcement work turned into a competitive input rather than a back-office cost.

Mercor's own software handles the matching and screening, parsing résumés and interview responses to fill roles at a speed and volume conventional staffing agencies are not built for. The company takes a cut of what labs pay contractors, which ties its revenue directly to how much training and evaluation work the AI industry commissions.

That structure produced steep growth. Mercor signed major AI developers as clients, scaled its contractor base into the tens of thousands, and raised venture funding at a multibillion-dollar valuation within roughly two years of launching. Foody, still in his early 20s, became one of the youngest founders running a company of that size.

The business also sits inside an unresolved argument about AI's labor footprint. Mercor's model holds that advanced systems increase demand for expert human input rather than erasing it, and that the work can pay professional rates instead of gig wages. Whether that demand lasts as models improve is still an open question. His place on the 2026 TIME100 Next list reflects attention to the human infrastructure underneath AI, not only the models themselves.

Illustration: Quartz

Rati Sahi Levesque runs Kraken alongside co-chief executive Arjun Sethi, having risen from one of the exchange's earliest employees to its top operational leader. Kraken, founded in 2011, is among the longest-operating cryptocurrency exchanges in the world and one of the few to trade through every boom-and-bust cycle the industry has produced.

Levesque joined in 2014, when Kraken was a spot trading venue with a few dozen staff, and moved through client-facing and operations roles before becoming chief operating officer. She was named co-chief executive in 2024, ending the founder-led structure the company had kept for more than a decade.

Her tenure has coincided with Kraken's expansion beyond buying and selling bitcoin. The exchange added derivatives, staking, payments infrastructure and commission-free trading in U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds, putting it in competition with conventional brokerages. It also bought the futures platform NinjaTrader, extending its reach into traditional derivatives markets.

That range of businesses has made operational discipline the central management problem. Running a regulated brokerage, a futures venue and a crypto exchange under one roof requires compliance systems, custody controls and reporting standards the industry long treated as optional. An eventual public listing would expose Kraken's financials and internal controls to scrutiny few digital asset firms have faced.

The regulatory backdrop shifted in Kraken's favor over the same period. The company settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 over its staking-as-a-service product, paying a fine and ending the offering for U.S. customers. The agency dropped a separate suit against the exchange in 2025 as federal policy toward digital assets loosened.

Levesque's place on the 2026 TIME100 Next list reflects that kind of influence: the operational work of turning a crypto exchange into something that functions like a conventional financial institution.

Illustration: Quartz

Tosin Eniolorunda is co-founder and chief executive of Moniepoint, the Nigerian financial services company valued above $1 billion after a 2024 funding round led by Development Partners International. The business handles payments, banking and credit for millions of small merchants across Nigeria.

Eniolorunda founded the company in 2015 with Felix Ike under the name TeamApt. He had been an engineer at Interswitch, the Nigerian payments firm. The early business sold software infrastructure to banks. Its defining pivot came when it started serving merchants directly, instead of selling into the institutions those merchants relied on.

That shift produced the company's most visible product: point-of-sale terminals run by a network of agents in markets, shopfronts and roadside kiosks. Bank branches are thin outside Nigeria's major cities. Those agents act as informal tellers, taking cash deposits, withdrawals and transfers from customers who may never set foot in a branch. Agents earn a commission on the transactions they process. The model grew alongside the country's push toward cashless payments. It absorbed heavy demand during the 2023 naira redesign, when physical notes turned scarce.

Moniepoint later adopted its current name across the business, broadening from payments into business current accounts, working capital loans and expense tools for merchants already using its terminals. It has since moved into cross-border remittances aimed at money sent home by Nigerians living abroad.

The economics depend on volume rather than margin. Serving millions of micro-merchants at small per-transaction fees requires payment rails that stay online through unreliable power and connectivity. It also requires a credit function able to underwrite borrowers with no conventional credit history, using terminal transaction data in place of a bureau file.

Eniolorunda's place on the 2026 TIME100 Next list reflects a company designed around conditions specific to its home market rather than a Western fintech template adapted for Africa. His tribute on the list was written by Tony Elumelu, the Nigerian investor and chairman of United Bank for Africa.