Hello readers! We are highlighting an incredible story from the technology sector. Lucy Guo, the co-founder of the technology firm Scale AI, is now the youngest female billionaire in the world. Lucy Guo has surpassed the pop superstar Taylor Swift according to a latest Forbes report.

According to Forbes, Lucy Guo has gained a fortune of $1.25 billion (or around Rp 20 trillion) at only 30 years old on her way to severing the title. Sixty percent of Guo wealth has resulted from her efforts in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. Moreover, Taylor Swift was 32 when she became a billionaire in late 2023 and had held the title for a bit over a year. Swift and Guo are two out of a handful of self made female billionaires under the age of 40.

Guo net worth increased rapidly because of the large share she had in Scale AI. The company value jumped with Meta acquisition of a 49 percent stake in June 2025 for $14.3 billion, which valued the company at $25 billion. Guo left Scale AI in 2018 but maintained a large enough ownership stake (5 percent) to see her net worth increase to its current amount.

Lucy Guo is an American entrepreneur and engineer. As the co-founder of the artificial intelligence company Scale AI, Guo is ascending the ladder of success. Guo is also the founder and CEO of Passes, a platform designed specifically for content creators.

Guo started her entrepreneurial ordeal when she was quite young. Raised in Fremont, California, by Chinese immigrant parents who were electrical engineers themselves, Guo taught herself to code while in middle school. In 2014 Guo dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University to take the prestigious Thiel Fellowship, a grant awarded to young people wanting to build companies instead of completing academic studies.

After graduationg college, she did her first internship at Facebook and then became the very first woman designer at Snapchat, where she worked on Snap Maps. In 2016, she founded Scale AI with a friend, Alexandr Wang, whom she met while at Quora. Scale AI provided data labeling services for AI companies, including companies like Tesla and OpenAI. Although Guo left Scale AI in 2018, she still owned 5% of the company. This has been her primary source of wealth since Scale AI's estimated value reached $25 billion in 2025.

After Guo left Scale AI, she started a venture capital firm called Backend Capital, which invests in early stage technology companies. Guo began another venture called Passes, an online content creation platform. Passes has had venture capitalists and influencer users, but has also faced challenges regarding content moderation policy.

Guo success story began when she was young and eager to escape a difficult financial situation. Raised in Freeman, California, as the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents who were electrical engineers, she experienced bullying related to her poverty in school. "I was bullied often for being poor at school. So I was like, 'Okay, I have to make my own money'" she told Business Insider.

Guo began coding in middle school and was self taught. She started creating bots for online games and was able to make money off of them. This love for coding lead her to Carnegie Mellon University where she began to study computer science. However, Guo dropped out of school at the age of 21 in 2014, just before she graduated. She accepted the Thiel Fellowship, which is a program founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel that gives young entrepreneurs a $100,000 grant to create a company instead of going to college.

After she left school, she interned at Facebook and went on to become the first female product designer at Snap, or Snapchat. While at Quora, she met Alexandr Wang (Сo-Founder) and in 2016, they co-founded Scale AI. When Guo co-founded Scale, she was 21 and Wang was 19.

Scale AI business model was designed to provide AI systems with high quality data for their training, specifically in the field of autonomous vehicles. After explaining its business model, Scale AI began to experience enormous success, and they had major clients like Cruise and Tesla. They also secured contracts with the U.S. government to use data analytics for satellite imagery during the war in Ukraine, and they also worked with OpenAI, which was training its large language models such as ChatGPT at the time.

Even though both had enjoyed immense success, Guo and Wang disagreed in 2018, and Wang, who was the CEO, fired her. "We had some differences, but I am proud of everything Scale AI has achieved" said Guo.

After Guo left Scale AI, she began to try new things. She started a venture capital firm called Backend Capital which invests in early stage startups. One prominent investment was in Ramp, a financial software company now valued at $13 billion.

Her passion for entrepreneurship inspired her to create another company called Passes, a platform for creators to monetize their content through subscriptions, livestreams, and one on one calls. Passes has raised $50 million in capital and has a valuation of $150 million. The platform has had its share of controversies, the most notable one being in February of 2025, when a creator filed suit against the platform for having the platform host sexually explicit content of hers when she was a minor, a claim that Guo and Passes disputed.

From college dropout to billionaire, her story is an amazing example of how a person can have a vision and persistence to overcome obstacles and develop extraordinary success by being true to themselves in a rapidly changing industry.