Is "one of the co-founders" ever correct?

Compare to "one of the founders".

Does it depend on the specific person you're talking about? Google has 7M+ results for the phrase but I can't search it on NGrams successfully because of the hyphen. (I think.)

Solution 1:

Theoretically, you could be referring to people who could be either "founders of a company" or "founders of companies". In the latter case, the founders could have founded their companies independently, so "co-founders" would be used to indicate that they did not in fact found separately. I think "co-founders" is redundant in virtually all other uses, though.

Solution 2:

It is a little redundant, but I don't think it is wrong. However, I would be more inclined to say "one of the founders."