By Alexandra York, Leonard Schoenberger and Dean Sterling Jones

When Marius Meiners quit his job at big four consulting firm PwC in September 2024, he didn’t have a plan. But he was ready for a change. So he applied to Antler’s Berlin-based pre-seed accelerator (similar to Y Combinator). In October, he started the program without an idea, but by December, he’d fully committed to entrepreneurship.

It was at Antler that the 29-year-old met his now cofounders, Daniel Drabo, 27, and over-30 cofounder Tobias Siwonia. In January 2025, they officially launched Peec.ai, a $29 million-backed AI startup that helps consumer brands understand if and how AI chatbots are talking about them.

“I didn't want to do something boring—like the next compliance app or anything too heavily B2B. I like consumer stuff,” CEO Meiners says. “But I'm also a software developer at heart, so when AI came around, I really wanted to do something with AI and consumer.”

The trio landed on building a “GEO,” or Generative Engine Optimization, platform to help consumer brands better market themselves in the world of AI. Many of us have heard of SEO, the strategy used to get your website seen by search engines like Google. Peec takes that same approach and applies it to chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. Now, clients ranging from Chanel to travel booking platform Omio use Peec to gain insights on whether they’re showing up in chatbots’ answers to consumers' questions—like “what’s appropriate to wear to the office?” or “what’s the cheapest way to travel to Italy?” Then, Peec’s software provides “actions,” with structured and personalized recommendations on how to improve the results.

While Peec stood out from its peers in part due to its venture-backing—including a $21 million Series A led by European venture firm Singular in November 2025—they’re not the only startup changing the way media and marketing work in our new AI-powered world. While Peec focuses on where a brand appears, Gabriele Franco, 26, and Cristian Nozzi, 28, are tackling the money behind those placements. Their platform, Cassandra, uses AI to automate advertising budgets with the precision of a quant hedge fund, says Franco. By analyzing both online and offline performance, the technology turns raw data into personalized media plans for marketers—managing over $550 million in annual ad spend for more than 70 clients like Ferragamo, Loop Earplugs and Verisure.

AI is also changing the math for content creators. Take William Monange, 27, Harry Fitzgerald, 29, and Joel Morris, 28, the cofounders of Fanvue. Their subscription service provides “creator AI” tools to users including Cardi B and Swiss footballer Alisha Lehmann to automate fan interactions—like messaging back and forth, and deepen fan engagement—by sharing subscriber-exclusive content. These tools helped the trio scale to 17 million users and 325,000 creators in just over two years, and they closed a $22 million Series A earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Zora Feraji, 29, and Grace Andrews, 28, are professionalizing the creator economy from the inside out. Feraji founded HAUZ to fix the industry’s 30-day payment lag with her “same-day” model, while her second venture, CreatorHQ, automates contracts and revenue tracking. Andrews, the former brand director for The Diary of A CEO, helps employees become corporate creators through Launchpad, a strategy and training platform that boosts their personal brands. And she helps others better understand the world of creative entrepreneurship and consumer insights with her bestselling Substack, Community Service. “I’m passionate about proving a more sustainable model of entrepreneurship, one that does not require burnout as the entry fee,” Andrews says.

Even as AI dominates headlines, this year’s list proves there is still room for breakout success in traditional media. In 2020, when Faridah Abíké-Íyímídé was still a student, she signed a seven-figure, two-book deal for her debut YA novel, Ace of Spades, in a pre-empt by Macmillan Children's Publishing Group (U.S.) and Usborne (U.K.)—taking the book off the market before an auction could even occur. More recently, the now 27-year-old secured a second seven-figure deal for her third book, The Heirs. Literary critic Jo Hamya, 28, is making her own mark in prestige publishing: her novels Three Rooms and The Hypocrite were published by major houses like Jonathan Cape and Pantheon to widespread acclaim, and the BBC has already purchased the film and TV rights for the latter.

For folks who are struggling to make sense of this fast-paced new media environment, Lara Sophie Bothur, 29, is here to help. A self-described “tech translator,” Bothur makes emerging technologies like AI accessible to the wider public—a mission inspired by explaining digital tools to her 101-year-old grandfather. After serving as Deloitte’s first full-time corporate influencer, she launched her own media firm in 2025, partnering with NVIDIA and OpenAI to educate and inform her 400,000 LinkedIn followers on the future of technology.

“I truly believe that ‘tech translator’ is a new profession that we need many more of," says Bothur. “Only if we explain technology better can we truly understand it, trust it and actively shape the future.”

To select the 2026 honorees, Forbes collected nominations from Under 30 alumni and the public, conducted our own research and tapped the expertise of independent judges: Steven Bartlett, Founder and CEO, Steven.com; Sophia Galer, journalist and author; Coco Mellors, author; and Sara Spaennar, vice president of Global Marketing at Zalando. All candidates in this year’s class must have been 29 or younger as of April 14, 2026 and never before named to a Europe, U.S. or Asia 30 Under 30 list.

This year’s list was edited by Alexandra York, Dean Sterling Jones and Leonard Schoenberger. For a link to our complete 2026 Under 30 Europe Media & Marketing list, click here, and for full 2026 30 Under 30 Europe coverage, click here.

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