How young minds revolutionise everyday problems with bold ideas and ambition

Who says you need to grow up to shake things up? Meet the young minds making money smarter, accounting cooler and food waste yesterday’s problem. Armed with big ideas, bold moves and some serious ambition, these go-getters aren't waiting for permission to make their mark.

They're building businesses, challenging the usual way of doing things and turning everyday problems into exciting opportunities. From classroom brainstorms to real-world breakthroughs, these changemakers are proving that age is just a number when you've got ideas that matter.

Abu Dhabi student Hrithik Manikandan is taking on climate change and financial exclusion at the same time, and he already has two live apps to show for it. Now, most people wait until university to start solving real-world problems. Manikandan started much earlier.

The Year 13 student at Brighton College Abu Dhabi and founder of start-up OrzyneX Innovations is working on two big questions at once. How do you make climate action something people can actually measure? And how do you bring the people the financial system overlooks into view?

His climate journey began in Year 9, when he designed a portable carbon-capture "umbrella" for a school project. In 2025, at a Cambridge Judge Business School youth programme, he and his team designed Eco Tower, a smart air-purification concept for cleaner cities. On a junior data-science programme, mentored by a former Oxford researcher, he built an AI tool that predicts country-level CO2 emissions, with interactive maps.

Later, he analysed 124 studies on carbon-footprint calculators and found that they measure emissions in so many ways that results are hard to compare. The paper was published in an international social science journal and the research earned him a CREST Gold Award.

"I kept seeing the same gap," he says. "Everyone agrees we should cut emissions, but schools and families have no simple way to measure what they are actually doing."

His answer is a three-part Net Zero Schools model, which he also puts into practice as House Sustainability Leader at his school. The first part is a forum that brings schools together. The second is a Climate Action Toolkit for planning projects. The third is ChonX, an app where students log eco-actions with photo proof, earn points, climb leaderboards and get guidance from an AI eco-coach. Schools use it to track their progress towards Net Zero.

Hrithik is a Youth Champion and Project Coordinator with 1M1B, the UN-accredited youth network. With them, he launched the toolkit at a UAE–India Sustainable Schools Leadership Forum in Abu Dhabi. He has also presented ChonX at the United Nations in Geneva and at UN House in New Delhi.

His second mission started closer to home. He watched workers queue at UAE exchange houses to send money to their families. Their careful habits, like paying rent on time and sending money home every month, were invisible to banks.

He explored this "invisible credit" in his book, Beyond the Score, and then tested it scientifically. Using 10,000 simulated migrant-worker profiles, he compared data-science models to see whether everyday behaviour could support fairer credit decisions. The paper was published in the National High School Journal of Science.

That research became Finangl, an app that builds financial literacy and smart money habits for migrant workers and school students alike. It also compares remittance rates so more money reaches home. Next up is alternative credit scoring, so the everyday reliability of people in hidden economies counts towards fair credit.

Both ChonX and Finangl are now live on the App Store and Google Play.

Hrithik is also a Global Youth Ambassador and project manager with GreenCar, a not-for-profit carpooling platform in India. He has helped build more than ten CSR partnerships and reach over 1,000 young people. This summer at Yale Young Global Scholars, he led his team's capstone project, Akar Tambak, a plan to restore mangroves inside working shrimp farms in Indonesia.

Away from the screen, he is a Carnatic vocalist and keyboardist and plays chess. By 16, he was the author of two published books, including his debut novel, The Fire We Kept, and his passion for writing continues through the money blogs he writes for Finangl's Learn section.

His philosophy is simple: "Science tells you what the problem is. Technology lets you do something about it."

Two seventeen-year-old Grade 12 students, Aadit Agarwal, and Abhijay Arun, developed a financial literacy platform that teaches youth to manage money through hands-on experience rather than textbooks.

For Aliasgar Gandhi, a sharp, ACCA-qualified accountant, staring at flickering screens at 2am and manually crunching numbers has been extremely frustrating. Throughout his career in startups and multinational companies, he has witnessed exceptional finance teams being bogged down by outdated manual processes.

“It wasn’t the hard work that broke me; it was the pointless work. So in early 2026, I walked away. I didn’t want to change my job, but I wanted to rewrite the rules of finance. Leaving the corporate world behind at age 25, I moved to build an accounting practice with the right software that could do the work in minutes.”

In accounting, clients often value years of experience more than sheer efficiency. That’s when he approached Shabbir Nadir, his father’s childhood friend, who had 25 years of Gulf experience; together they launched Argent Accounting and Advisory.

The unique part is the equal partnership, blending Nadir’s 25 years of veteran judgment with 25-year-old Gandhi’s digital-first, AI-driven efficiency.

“Most people have seen a family business where the son works for his father. Here, I work with a man my father’s age, but as his equal partner.

I want to change how people see accounting - not as a boring compliance chore to put up with, but as one of the most powerful tools a business has.”

“Our breakthrough came when we executed a one-off due diligence project for a clinic so flawlessly that it earned us the entire finance function on a full retainer. That’s when everything felt real.”

“The hardest part for me was learning to manage myself because I was nowhere near management level when I had left the job. Here, I went from being a single spoke in a corporate wheel to being the engine of my own company - handling HR, marketing, and IT all at once. I also had to navigate the unspoken boardroom question: “Are you too young to be here?”

Growing up in Dubai for eighteen years, two brothers, Hasan and Omair Sarwar, constantly saw cafes throwing out fresh food at closing time, while everyone around them stressed about the rising cost of living.

Hasan said, "The UAE wastes over $3.5 billion of food a year, and people want quality food at prices they can afford. We realised we weren’t just looking at two massive problems - we were looking at the solution to both. That’s how Peekabox was born."

Our app lets restaurants and grocery stores sell their daily surplus as surprise boxes at 50-70% off. At 25, securing trust was tough, but we raised a $1.5M seed round and launched in May 2026. Within weeks, we hit #1 on the App Store with 100,000 users."

They have partnered with over 1,000 stores, including Carrefour, Tim Hortons, and PAUL. "The biggest lesson I learned post-launch was that strong downloads don't guarantee repeat orders. I quickly shifted focus from vanity metrics to real customer habits and retention. I learned true success isn't a launch-day spike; it's creating lasting habits. Now, we’re expanding to hotels with Accor, giving guests access to top-tier surplus food."

Adnaan Jassat founded Thriller Middle East seeing a clear market gap. There was substantial, fast-growing demand in the region for limited-edition sneakers and collectibles, and no trusted infrastructure to serve it.

"I realised early on that I wasn’t the only one obsessed with scarce products. I was just one of the few willing to solve the real problem, which was trust. So we built a marketplace around authentication first."

"Building at a young age taught me that inexperience was my greatest constraint and confidence was my greatest asset. Being young is an advantage in understanding the customer, but a disadvantage in almost everything else, until you prove otherwise with results."

If you’re going to do anything new or innovative, you have to be willing to be misunderstood. Credibility is built by keeping promises, one after another, not by talking about them. Greatness comes from character. And character isn’t formed out of smart people, it’s formed out of people who suffered. I’d rather be underestimated and overdeliver than the other way round.

Our most significant milestone was a stake sale valuing Thriller Middle East at $20 million—two and a half times the US$8 million valuation in 2022.