By the age of 17, he was working full-time coding at the question-and-answer site Quora, where he met Scale’s cofounder, Lucy Guo. With her, Wang then started the company Scale AI in 2016.
Digital Desk: 25-year-old
Alexandr Wang,
Forbes', is the new youngest self-made billionaire.
Alexandr Wang had dropped out of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) at the age of 19 to co-found the software company Scale AI. Now, he is helping not only around 300 companies but even America’s Air Force and Army to unlock their data’s potential by delivering high-quality training data for AI applications.
Looking back, Wang was a math whiz kid who competed in national math and coding competitions. In sixth grade, he signed up for his first national math competition, intent on securing a free ticket to Disney World, as per Forbes. He didn’t win the competition, but he clinched his trip to the Magic Kingdom.
Alexandr Wang grew up in the shadow of New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Lab, the top-secret site where the USA developed its first atomic bomb during World War II, as per the Forbes report.
By the age of 17, he was working full-time coding at the question-and-answer site Quora, where he met Scale’s cofounder, Lucy Guo. With her, Wang then started the company Scale AI in 2016.
Wang has worked with over 300 companies, including Toyota Research Institute, OpenAI, and Lyft, to turn rivers of raw data into gold.The raw details can be like millions of shipping documents or raw footage from self-driving cars.
How Did Alexandre Wang Become A Billionaire?
A
$325 million funding round last year valued Wang’s company, Scale AI, which
generates an estimated $100 million in revenue, at $7.3 billion.
Wang’s
estimated 15% stake in his company is worth $1 billion, making him the world’s
youngest self-made billionaire, as per Forbes. The next youngest is Pedro
Franceschi, the 25-year-old Brazilian cofounder of credit card company Brex.
His company Scale’s technology reportedly analyses satellite images much faster than human analysts to determine how much damage Russian bombs are causing in Ukraine. So it’s useful for the military.
"Every industry is sitting on huge amounts of data," Wang says, who appeared on the Forbes under 30 lists in 2018. "Our goal is to help them unlock the potential of the data and then supercharge their businesses with AI."
