Scale AI Cofounder Alex Wang Regains World’s Youngest Self-Made Billionaire Title

Scale AI cofounder Alex Wang debuted on Forbes’ billionaires list in May 2022, at age 25, as the youngest self-made person in the world to boast a ten-figure fortune–before quickly falling from the billionaire ranks as the valuations of private tech companies plummeted over the next year. Now Wang, at age 27, is back. He has regained the title of youngest self-made billionaire, after announcing Tuesday that his artificial intelligence unicorn has raised $1 billion at a $13.8 billion valuation.

Forbes estimates that Wang is worth $2 billion following the deal, thanks to his estimated 14% stake in Scale AI. That’s twice as much as he was worth in May 2022, when Scale had most recently raised funding at a $7.3 billion valuation in a Series E round during 2021. Despite being two years older than he was back then, Wang is still four years younger than the world’s next youngest self-made billionaire: 31-year-old DoorDash cofounder Stanley Tang.

See Forbes’ Original Video On Alex Wang: The New Youngest Self-Made Billionaire In The World Is A 25-Year-Old College Dropout (forbes.com)

Wang cofounded Scale AI in 2016 after dropping out of MIT the summer after his freshman year. His cofounder Lucy Guo, 29, left Scale in 2018 to cofound venture capital firm Backend Capital and Patreon competitor Passes. Today, Scale AI supplies the human labor and some software offerings for tasks like labeling the data needed to train AI for self-driving cars and large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT.

Scale first became a unicorn in 2019, when it raised a Series C round at a $1 billion valuation. A year later, the company was valued at $3.5 billion in a Series D funding round on the way to the $7.3 billion series E round that initially made Wang the youngest self-made billionaire. Scale’s latest capital infusion, announced in a Tuesday press release, came from a who’s who of venture capitalists and leading players in the artificial intelligence space, including VC firm Accel and billionaire Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, as well as Nvidia and the investment arms of chipmakers Intel and AMD.

“From day one, Scale has been laser-focused on unlocking the potential of data for AI,” said Dan Levine, partner at Accel, in the press release. “All of the major advancements in the industry we have today wouldn’t have been possible without Scale’s data engine at the center.”

Wang, too, is bullish, tweeting Tuesday: “@Scale_AI has never been better positioned to accelerate the abundance of frontier data and pave the road for [Artificial General Intelligence].”