Anderson Chen, 22, put about $80,000 of savings into Operon, an AI startup for factories, and plans not to go back to college. Here is what he built and what is unproven.
Anderson Chen, a 22-year-old from Taiwan, put almost all his personal savings, around $80,000, into an AI startup called Operon. Now he plans not to return to university. He is on a second gap year from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he studies chemical engineering and business. He shared his story in an essay with Business Insider.
Operon is based in San Francisco. It works with heavy industries such as manufacturing, oil and gas, and construction. The company automates tasks that used to be done by human operators and specialists.
Chen says the problem is messy data. Factories run on strict step-by-step procedures, but their records are hard for AI to read. He says popular AI models were never trained on that private information. Operon organizes the data and builds what he calls a context layer, so AI tools can carry out multi-step tasks on their own.
In May, Operon took part in a $700,000 pre-seed round, which is an early round of funding. Y Combinator, a well-known startup program, was among the investors. Chen says the round closed in about three days.
Chen says he is not paying himself a salary, though the company pays its employees. His savings came from earlier ventures. At 14 he sold sneakers and ran Amazon dropshipping. In college he built a tutoring agency that linked Malaysian students with parents in Singapore.
Chen says he was scared to drop out, since a bachelor's degree is the standard where he grew up. His parents first worried, but now support him. He says his gap-year costs were covered by a fellowship, so he took on no risk there.
He also points to the speed of AI. He says OpenAI recently solved a version of a famous fluid dynamics problem that his professor once called unsolvable. His conclusion is that skilled AI users may outperform experts. That claim comes from Chen and is not checked in his essay.
The essay does not give revenue, results for clients, or what the company is worth. It is also unclear how many of the 20 clients will become paying long-term customers. Chen says competitors are led by founders in their 40s and 50s, and he sees doubts about his young team as a way to get attention. Whether Operon can win over industrial buyers is still unproven.
A young founder is betting savings and school on AI for factories, but the essay shares no revenue or results, so the bet remains unproven.
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