At just 16 years old, Briton Toby Brown made headlines by raising $1 million for his AI project Beem, proving that age and traditional schooling are no barriers to developing your own projects.
At just 16 years old, Briton Toby Brown made headlines by raising $1 million for his AI project Beem, proving that age and traditional schooling are no barriers to developing your own projects.
For his 7th birthday, Toby asked for a Raspberry Pi, a cheap computer for programming. After that, he used almost anything he could get his hands on to learn. Mostly educational materials from YouTube and Google.
When Toby was about nine, he realized that not many people shared his interests. The boy says it was a pretty lonely experience. He would come home from school and spend the rest of the day experimenting with technology. Then he would go back to school and not talk to anyone about it, not even his friends.
"I barely graduated from school, being an 'average' student. I love learning, but not the process of schooling itself. I prefer to study on my own terms, which is what I often did until the wee hours of the morning," Toby told Business Insider.
In 2023, the teenager developed the concept of Beem and began to create it on his own.
Toby can't talk about the project, but says it's a combination of his ideas and research.
“I hope that, if implemented correctly, it will redefine the way people interact with technology. My goal has always been to reduce the time spent on what you don’t want to do and build a protective dome around what you do want to do,” is all the guy said about Beem.
Then Toby decided to devote all his time to the project, leaving his studies, and realized that attracting venture capital was the best way to make it happen.
Toby began making his first attempts to find investors during the summer holidays in 2024. He cycled to various offices in his hometown of London, explaining and presenting the product to them.
Then he held a series of meetings with venture capitalists: first in New York, and then with those located in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, mostly via Zoom.
“I had no one to teach (or mentor) me on how to pitch to investors. So I took a wild approach: I worked tirelessly until I got it right. I changed my story each time, emphasizing some aspects and being less specific about others, depending on the audience. I was lucky that it came naturally to me,” Toby shared.
In November 2024, the guy met via Zoom with a foundation called South Park Commons, founded by some of Facebook's early engineers. According to the guy, he was genuinely inspired by the meeting, and it seems to have worked.
The guy found out about the investment on his 16th birthday.
“When I got the call that they were ready to invest $1 million in my project, I was at home with my mom and our dog. I just said, ‘It happened.’ It felt like I was out of my body. My mom’s reaction was one of shock and immense excitement,” the teenager recalls.
To move to the United States, Toby obtained an O-1 visa, pompously called a visa for foreigners with "exceptional abilities," overcoming the difficulties caused by the lack of official diplomas.
He has now been living in San Francisco for three months.
“Living in San Francisco has been the most exciting experience of my life so far,” says Toby.
The boy plans to return to Britain briefly to take his school exams, but remains focused on expanding his artificial intelligence business.
