Scale AI Cofounder Is The World's Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire
Buzzy artificial intelligence company Scale AI is wrapping up a tender offer that allows early employees and investors in the nine-year-old private company to sell shares to new or returning investors. The deal, which one source said will 'go ahead provided the sky doesn't fall down' and is slated to be completed by June 1, values the AI company at $25 billion, according to several people familiar with the offer. That's an 80% jump since last May, when it raised $1 billion at a $13.8 billion valuation.
The new valuation makes Lucy Guo, the 30-year-old cofounder of Scale AI, the youngest self-made woman billionaire on the planet. Guo unseats pop star Taylor Swift, 35, who has held that title since Forbes declared her a billionaire in late 2023.
Guo, a computer science college dropout, cofounded artificial intelligence firm Scale AI in 2016–when she was 21–with Alexandr Wang, who was then 19. Wang became CEO and Guo ran the operations and product design teams at the San Francisco startup. The cofounders both made Forbes' Under 30 list in 2018. That same year, the pair disagreed about how the company was being run, and Wang reportedly fired Guo. 'We had a difference of opinion but I am proud of what Scale AI has accomplished,' Guo says in a statement.
After leaving Scale AI, she astutely held on to most of her stake in the company while pursuing her next startup. Guo still owns an estimated stake of just under 5% of Scale AI worth nearly $1.2 billion; she won't comment on whether she is selling any of her stake as part of the tender offer. Add in her other assets–including her holding in her second startup, Passes–and she's worth $1.25 billion, Forbes estimates. 'I don't really think about it much, it's a bit wild. Too bad it's all on paper haha,' says Guo via text in response to her new billionaire status.
The bump in Scale's value also lifts the fortune of the world's youngest self-made billionaire, CEO Alexandr Wang, to an estimated $3.6 billion, up from $2 billion. A spokesperson for Scale AI declined to comment.
Guo is one of just six self-made women billionaires on the planet under the age of 40. She's also the only one who's made the bulk of her fortune from a company she left years ago.
The daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, Guo grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and began coding while in middle school. She studied computer science and human-computer interactions at Carnegie Mellon University, but dropped out before graduating to become a Thiel Fellow– a program sponsored by billionaire investor Peter Thiel to pay entrepreneurial college-age students to create companies. In 2015, Guo got a job as a product designer at question-and-answer firm Quora, where she met Wang. She left Quora and worked briefly at Snapchat doing product design before she and Wang decided to cofound Scale AI in 2016.
The company essentially does what Wang has called 'the picks and shovels' work, labeling the data required to power AI. Scale started out by paying low wages to contract workers who labeled images needed to train the AI for self-driving cars. Customers grew to include the U.S. government–Scale's tech has been used to analyze satellite images in Ukraine–and OpenAI, for help in training ChatGPT.
After Guo left Scale, she started a small venture capital firm called Backend Capital to invest in early stage companies. One of its best investments: a six-figure bet in 2020 on financial software firm Ramp–a company now valued at $13 billion (all three of its cofounders are now billionaires).
Then, in 2022, she shifted her focus away from the VC firm to start her own business called Passes, which is similar to Patreon and OnlyFans, a platform for creators and celebrities to connect with fans, who pay for online chats and videos. Passes signed deals with celebrities including gymnast Olivia Dunne, basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal and DJ Kygo. Guo raised $50 million over three rounds from 2022 to 2024 from investors like Mary Meeker's Bond Capital, talent agent Michael Ovitz and Menlo Ventures, valuing the company at $150 million.
Last month Passes was hit with a lawsuit accusing the company of hosting child sexual assault material (CSAM). As Forbes reported in March, right before the suit was filed, Passes banned all underage creators and purged the site of their content. A spokesperson for Passes told Forbes last week that it 'refutes any claims that it approved or condoned the posting of underage explicit content on its platform. Any effort to attribute alleged misconduct of third parties to Passes is baseless and nothing more than an effort to entangle Passes and its founder, Lucy Guo, in the lawsuit.'
In addition to spending long hours at work, Guo is religious about her daily workouts at gym chain Barry's Bootcamp. In early April she posted on Instagram 'Discipline > Sleep. 3000 classes complete' below a photo of her at Barry's in West Hollywood holding a sign that read 'Lucy Hiits 3000!' Her other favorite thing to post: photos from music festivals like Coachella and the recent Ultra Music Festival in Miami. It's a mix of work and fun that never ends. Last weekend, Passes threw a big bash tied to the Coachella Music Festival, which started on Friday, April 11. Said Guo via text from Los Angeles, where she now lives, 'Quite literally thousands of RSVPs.'
Additional reporting by Iain Martin
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