At 22, I Put $80,000 of Savings Into an Industrial AI Startup—and Am Dropping College

Building Operon during a gap year

Chen started Operon Solutions during his first gap year. The industrial AI startup automates work once done by human operators and specialists in manufacturing, oil and gas, and construction.

He initially expected to return to school, but says the company grew exponentially near the end of that year. He chose to take another year off and is now planning not to return to college.

A difficult choice about college

Chen said he was scared of leaving college, describing a bachelor's degree as the Asian standard. He said his parents are now supportive of his plans. He also cited the pace of AI development as a reason to stay focused on Operon. He recalled that a fluid dynamics professor had called a problem unsolvable during Chen's sophomore year, while OpenAI recently solved a version of the Navier–Stokes problem.

AI opportunity in heavy industry

Chen said he saw engineers use ChatGPT to interpret engineering PDFs and write documentation. But he believed frontier AI models could not understand those documents because they had not been trained on the confidential data.

He said that realization led him to start Operon. The company is building a context layer intended to support agentic workflows, and Chen said it has about 20 clients, with work ranging from proofs of concept to full contracts.

Funding and industry skepticism

Chen said he made the money he invested in Operon through businesses he started before the company. At 14, he sold sneakers and ran an Amazon dropshipping business. He said there is skepticism about the company because it works in heavy industries, where founders of competitors are in their 40s and 50s.