Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo has now become the youngest self-made female billionaire at the age of 30, replacing Taylor Swift. According to Forbes, her increase in net worth comes as Scale AI is involved in an impending tender offer set to be completed on June 1. The offer enables early employees and investors to sell their shares and estimates the company’s value at a whopping $25 billion, a rise of 80% from its valuation of $13.8 billion last year.
Scale AI, which was launched in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Guo, is recognized for its pioneering activity in artificial intelligence, namely data labeling as a means to train AI. Scale AI serves major clients such as the US government and OpenAI.
Guo’s achievement dates back to her childhood during middle school when she started learning how to code. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, her parents were Chinese immigrants. She attended Carnegie Mellon University but later dropped out after winning a Thiel Fellowship, a project by Peter Thiel to finance young entrepreneurs.
Following short stints at Quora, where she became acquainted with her co-founder, and Snapchat, Guo founded Scale AI in 2016. While she later departed the firm to explore other passions, she stayed within the technology and venture capital realms by starting Backend Capital and investing in unicorn firms such as Ramp.
Establishing New Platforms
In 2022, Guo introduced Passes, a creator subscription service akin to Patreon and OnlyFans. The product has gained such big-name attention as gymnast Olivia Dunne, NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal, and DJ Kygo. In three years, Passes raised $50 million in capital and was valued at $150 million.
However, the platform found itself under the spotlight of legal scrutiny recently when it was implicated in a suit alleging that it hosted child sexual abuse material (CSAM). According to Forbes, a Passes spokesperson stated, “The company denies any suggestions that it authorized or accepted underage explicit material,” and stated that all underage creators had already been banned when the suit was brought.
New Face Among Billionaire Women
With this feat, Guo supplants Taylor Swift, 35, as the youngest self-made woman billionaire, a designation Swift has held since Forbes bestowed it in late 2023. Of the worldwide roster of just more than 100 self-made women billionaires, only six are under 40 years old, and half of them are U.S. citizens.
