Who is Lucy Guo, Scale AI founder with $1.25 billion fortune to replace Taylor Swift as world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire
Lucy Guo, founder of Passe, has overtaken Taylor Swift to become the youngest self-made woman billionaire. Guo, 30, features on Forbes list of self-made women billionaires. According to Forbes, she is also one of only six self-made women billionaires in the world under the age of 40. Notably, Guo is the only one on that list who built most of her wealth from a company she no longer works at. Her former startup Scale AI is set for a tender offer valued at $25 billion. Guo recently shared a post on Instagram with the caption “Discipline > Sleep. 3000 classes complete 🥳”. Here’s everything you need to know about Lucy Guo
Who is Lucy Guo
Born on October 14, 1994, Guo was raised in Fremont, California by Chinese immigrant parents who were both electrical engineers. Despite their technical backgrounds, her parents were hesitant about her pursuing a career in technology, believing it would be challenging for a woman to succeed in the field.
Guo’s interest in technology began early; she started coding in second grade and, as a teenager, developed bots for online games like Neopets, selling in-game assets for profit. She enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University to study computer science but later dropped out in 2014 after receiving the Thiel Fellowship, a $100,000 grant encouraging young entrepreneurs to pursue their ventures.
After Carnegie Mellon, Guo interned at Facebook and later joined Snapchat as the company’s first female designer, contributing to the development of Snap Maps. She then worked at Quora, where she met Alexandr Wang with whom she went on to co-found Scale AI in 2016.
How ScaleAI laid the foundation for Guo’s billion-dollar fortune
Guo left ScaleAI just two years after starting it. Based in San Francisco, Scale AI is now valued at $14 billion, and a new tender offer could push that to $25 billion. Guo still holds about 5% of the company, giving her a stake worth around $1.2 billion.
After her exit from ScaleAI, Guo launched Backend Capital, a venture firm that backs talented engineers. But she didn’t stay away from building for long.
In 2022, she founded Passes, a platform designed to empower content creators by providing them with tools to monetize their work. The platform quickly gained traction, raising $40 million in a Series A funding round by 2024. citeturn0search4
As of April 2025, Guo’s estimated net worth is $1.25 billion, making her the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire at age 30.
