The Founder Who Got High on a Rooftop and Came Down With a Business
Wombo.ai cofounder Ben-Zion Benkhin on countering the “healthy amount of paranoia” about AI by building stupidly fun apps.
Watching the app you built hit the 10 million-download threshold would be a career high for most founders. But for Ben-Zion Benkhin, it’s just another day at the office. Within the last two years, Benkhin, 26, has launched two wildly popular artificial intelligence–based apps. The first was Wombo.ai, which uses AI to create highly shareable, delightfully weird deep fakes from a curated selection of songs and noises (lest you use it for more sinister purposes). The app hit 10 million downloads within the first two weeks of its release in March 2021, and soon Benkhin was courting investors including Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary. By June, the company announced a $6 million seed round.
His company would reach niche internet stardom again less than a year later with its second app, Dream, which spins user’s photos into whimsical AI-generated paintings. Here Benkhin recounts his entrepreneurial journey, from making a million by the time he graduated from high school to getting millions to use his apps.