30-Year-Old AI Startup Founder Becomes World's Youngest Billionaire

Lucy Guo, 30, co-founder of Scale AI, became the world's youngest billionaire. She achieved success on her own and, after leaving the company, retained her stake in it, writes Forbes.

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Popular artificial intelligence company Scale AI is completing a tender offer that allows employees and investors in the company to sell their shares to new or returning investors. The deal is “barring a catastrophe,” according to one person familiar with the matter, and should be completed by June 1. The company is valued at $25 billion, according to several people familiar with the matter. That’s an 80% jump from May last year, when the company raised $1 billion at a $13,8 billion valuation.

The new estimate makes Lucy Guo, the 30-year-old co-founder of Scale AI, the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, surpassing pop star Taylor Swift, 35, who had held the title since late 2023.

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Guo, a computer science dropout, founded ScaleAI in 2016 with Alexander Wang, then 19. Wang became CEO, while Guo ran the San Francisco-based startup. Both cofounders made the Forbes Under 30 list in 2018. That same year, they had disagreements over how to run the company, and Wang fired Guo.

"We had our differences, but I'm proud of what Scale AI has accomplished," she said.

Since leaving the company, Guo has wisely held on to most of her stake in it while working on her next startup. She currently owns just under 5% of Scale AI, which is valued at nearly $1,2 billion. She won’t say whether she’s selling any of that stake in the tender offer. With other holdings, including her stake in a second startup called Passes, Forbes estimates her net worth at $1,25 billion.

"I don't think about it much. It's a shame that all this is only on paper for now," she wrote.

Scale's rise in value also boosted the net worth of its youngest self-made male billionaire, CEO Alexander Wang, to $3,6 billion from $2 billion.

Guo is one of only six self-made billionaires in the world under 40. She is the only one who made most of her fortune from a company she left years ago.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Guo grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and began coding in high school. She studied computer science and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University but dropped out to become a Thiel Fellow, an initiative by billionaire Peter Thiel that pays students to work on startups. In 2015, she took a job as a product designer at Quora, where she met Wang. Guo later left Quora and worked briefly at Snapchat before co-founding Scale AI with him in 2016.

The company does what Wang calls the “pick and shovel” of AI: labeling the data needed to train AI. Scale initially hired freelance workers for a small fee. Later clients included the US government (Scale’s technology was used to analyze satellite imagery in Ukraine) and OpenAI (to train ChatGPT).

After leaving Scale, Guo founded the venture capital firm Backend Capital. One of her best investments was a six-figure investment in financial software company Ramp in 2020. The company is now valued at $13 billion (all three of its co-founders are now billionaires).

Then in 2022, Goh shifted her focus away from ventures and founded her own company, Passes, a platform similar to Patreon and OnlyFans where creators and celebrities can interact with fans by getting paid for online chats and videos. Stars who have signed with Passes include gymnast Olivia Dunn, basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal, and DJ Kygo. Goh has raised $50 million between 2022 and 2024. Passes has been valued at $150 million.

Last month, the company was hit with a lawsuit accusing it of hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

(The lawsuit was filed in February 2025 in the Federal Court for the Southern District of Florida by content creator Alice Rosenbloom. She alleges that Passes posted and distributed sexually explicit images and videos of her taken while she was a minor (one month before her 18th birthday). The lawsuit names Passes founder and CEO Lucy Guo, as well as two people described as the company's "agents," Alec Celestine and Lani Ginoza.

Rosenbloom claims that Celestine, a former contractor for Passes, recruited her in May 2024 and encouraged her to create explicit content despite knowing that she was underage. She claims that Go personally intervened to disable security mechanisms that would have flagged her content as CSAM. Passes denies the allegations, saying that it uses industry-standard tools like Microsoft PhotoDNA to automatically scan images for CSAM and that its platform does not allow explicit content. The company also claims that Celestine exaggerated his role in Passes, and points out that Rosenbloom later moved to OnlyFans due to compliance issues. – Note.)

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Shortly before the lawsuit was filed, Passes banned underage creators and removed their content from the platform. A Passes spokesperson said last week that the company “denies any allegations that it endorsed or tolerated content featuring minors. Any attempt to attribute the alleged conduct of third parties to Passes or its founder Lucy Guo is baseless and intended only to drag them into litigation.”

In addition to long work hours, Goh sticks to a strict workout regimen at Barry's Bootcamp. In early April, she posted on Instagram with the caption, "Discipline > Sleep. 3000 workouts completed," alongside a photo from Barry's in West Hollywood. Her other favorite topics to post about are music festivals like Coachella and the recent Ultra Music Festival in Miami.

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