This is Lucy Guo, the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire

Move over Taylor Swift. There’s a new youngest self-made female billionaire in town: Lucy Guo, the cofounder of artificial intelligence company Scale AI.

Scale AI, as the name suggests, is an artificial intelligence company valued in the region of $25 billion, a figure that has risen by 80% in a little over a year, which is what has led to Guo’s swift move to the top of the ladder.

Intriguingly, Guo’s new status comes despite her having left the company in 2018, seven years ago.

After dropping out of a computer science course at college, the 30-year-old, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, cofounded Scale AI at the age of 21 in 2016 with Alexander Wang, then 19.

What does Scale AI do?

Scale AI provides data-centric infrastructure to accelerate the development of AI applications, which includes data labelling and annotation, model evaluation and reinforcement learning with human feedback. It counts the U.S. government and OpenAI among its customers.

Guo and Wang had previously met while working for question-and-answer company Quora, where she served as a product designer. She also held a similar position at Snapchat for a brief period.

How Guo made money from being fired

Guo was in charge of the operations and product design teams at Scale AI but was reportedly fired by Wang, who was CEO, following a disagreement. “We had a difference of opinion but I am proud of what Scale AI has accomplished,” she stated at the time.

Despite the split, she held onto most of her stake in the company, which, despite being less than 5%, is now valued at $1.2 billion. She also has a second startup, Passes, a creator commerce platform, giving her an overall estimated net worth of $1.25 billion, per Forbes.

The world’s richest self-made billionaires, featuring Taylor Swift

While that makes Guo the youngest self-made female billionaire on the planet, she isn’t the richest.

35-year-old Swift ($1.6 billion) and 37-year-old Rihanna ($1.4 billion), whose music earnings are topped up considerably by her cosmetics brand, remain ahead of her on the list, although all three trail Melanie Perkins, 38, the cofounder and CEO of Canva, by some distance. The Australian is worth an estimated $5.7 billion, according to Forbes.

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