Meet man, who co-founded AI firm at 19, became youngest self-made billionaire at 25, his net worth is...

Young entrepreneurs around the world have led futuristic innovations, especially in the tech world. Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI is the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. He built his startup at 19, took it to billion-dollar heights and worked with some big names in the industry. His innovation in AI is a reminder that the tech future can open a whole new world which such young visionary minds can build on.  

Alexandr Wang’s billionaire story 

Wang became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at 25, in 2022. That year the company raised a USD 325 million funding round that made the company worth USD 7.3 billion (Rs 624,350,771,900). In 2024, the AI company raised USD 1 billion in another round which raised its worth even more at USD 13.8 billion (Rs 1,181,191,111,100). Wang owns 15 percent in the company and further high investments in ScaleAI increased his net worth beyond USD 2 billion (Rs 170,841,014,000). 

What is ScaleAI? 

ScaleAI was founded in 2016 in San Francisco. Its founder participated in the Y Combinator program, he talked to investors there and won from there started his AI firm which develops labeling software to name image, text, voice and video data, which performs task for building effective A.I. models at scale. The Y Combinator program is the one where startups present themselves to an audience which is strictly invite only investors and media persons.  

The tech firm’s valuation in billions has been made possible by industry leaders backing it, including Nvidia, Meta and Amazon, Accel Ventures, Tiger Global, Index Ventures and Spark Capital.  

Wang’s early life 

Alexandr Wang was born in 1997 in Los Alamos, New Mexico to Chinese immigrant parents who were also weapons physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he grew up in an environment deeply rooted in scientific innovations and technological advances. His early life in Los Alamos, which is also the birthplace of US' first atomic bomb during World War II instilled in him a deep interest to explore the powerful new age tech innovations.  

He was a coding prodigy since a very early age whose founding of a tech firm that explores advances in AI world is a brilliant example of technological vision and revolutionary guidance in the growth of AI. While still a teenager,he qualified for the Math Olympiad Program in 2013 and the US Physics Team in 2014 which showed his mathematical and tech prowess. Building complex programmes while cracking the national programming competitions from an early age made him one of the youngest leaders in contemporary times.  

No surprise, he was offered a full-time engineering job in Silicon Valley with the fintech company Addepar and then Quora at the age of 17, while still studying. At 19, Alexandr Wang co-founded Scale AI with Lucy Guo and enrolled in Y Combinator’s Summer 2016 batch. He dropped his studies and never completed them since.