Alexandr Wang, 25, dropped out of MIT at the age of 19 to cofound Scale AI and has become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.
His parents were physicists who performed on military weapons developments and he is now continuing to follow in their path.
Wang’s business AI is a 6-year-old company which has already signed three contracts worth up to $110 million.
How he became a billionaire
By the age of 17, Alexandr Wang was working full-time coding on the website Quora, which is where he met Scale’s cofounder, Lucy Guo.
Soon after, he ended up studying at MIT in the field of machine learning and founded Scale with Guo the summer after his freshman year.
In just over a period of four months, a $325 million funding round in April doubled Scale’s valuation to $7.3 billion. Wang’s 15% stake is now valued at $1 billion.
He was listed as Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list and told the firm:
“I told my parents it was just going to be a thing I did for the summer. Obviously, I never went back to school.”
Presently, Scale’s clients include significant global corporations such as AirBnB, Etsy, General Motors, LinkedIn, Nvidia, PayPal, Pinterest, Samsung, and Toyota. In addition to The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center of the United States Army, Air Force, and Department of Defense.
Wang’s billionaire success has prompted him to do great humanitarian good, Scale started providing free AI-ready data sources in March, allowing algorithm developers to quickly train and deploy AI to aid Ukraine’s defense against Russia.
The company spoke out to say:
“At Scale, we believe in using AI technology in support of democratic values. By providing these datasets at no cost to national security practitioners, we hope to support a diplomatic solution and swift end to this conflict.”
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