Dropped out from MIT to start a business, creating the most profitable AI "Shovel Seller".
Sun, Jul 19 2026
Dropped out from MIT to start a business, creating the most profitable AI "Shovel Seller".
"Time Magazine" selected a hundred influential figures in the field of artificial intelligence the year before last, including Alexandr Wang and other leading figures such as Fei-Fei Li, Jensen Huang, and Yanhong Li. Their contributions to the tech community are evident.
This week, the highly-anticipated artificial intelligence company Scale AI$1 billion fundraising round, with the company's valuation soaring to $13.8 billion. Backing it are some of Silicon Valley's most influential investors, as well as major tech companies like Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, and Meta, a luxurious financing lineup that is rare in the global venture capital field.
Scale AI's founder, a young Chinese entrepreneur Alexandr Wang, chose to leave MIT at the age of 19 to start the company with Lucy Guo. The two young founders are filled with passion and entrepreneurial drive, aiming to break new ground in the AI sector.
Their company, Scale AI, quickly became one of the most profitable AI startups globally. Alexandr Wang has an exceptional background, having grown up in a Chinese family of intellectuals, both parents being physicists. He garnered numerous accolades in American mathematics talent searches and excelled in his high school years, ranking among the top in computer science, physics, and mathematics Olympiads. Compared to his peers, Alexandr started working earlier, serving as an engineer at well-known Silicon Valley companies like Addepar and Quora.
Lucy Guo also has a profound background as an early self-taught programmer. She was part of the founding team of Twitter bots and gained extensive experience at companies like Facebook, Quora, and Snapchat. Her encounter with Alexandr Wang at Quora laid the foundation for their future entrepreneurial cooperation.
On the other hand, at the age of 18, Alexandr Wang was admitted to MIT majoring in mathematics and computer science. After a year of study, he made the significant decision to drop out and start a business, partly due to his intense interest in artificial intelligence and MIT's innovative and practical learning environment.
Not long ago, at the age of 22, Lucy decided to leave Carnegie Mellon University, while Alexandr was contributing to Scale AI, a company specializing in data labeling and AI model training. Scale AI, established in 2016, is dedicated to providing data annotation services for business users and assisting in training artificial intelligence models.
Alexandr continuously deepened his research and discovered that leaders in the field of autonomous driving required millions of miles of data to train their functions. This massive task is often difficult to execute efficiently due to limitations in human and technological resources. Consequently, Scale AI took on this task by providing annotation and labeling services for "real data," supporting the development of autonomous driving.
Scale AI's data annotation services are like the "shovel" in the field of artificial intelligence, providing important infrastructure for the generative artificial intelligence boom. With precise market insights, Scale AI quickly earned the trust of autonomous driving companies like Cruise and Waymo and further collaborated with OpenAI on the training of ChatGPT.
Today, Scale AI's business has far exceeded the field of autonomous driving, collaborating with many well-known companies such as Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, General Motors, PayPal, Pinterest, Samsung, Toyota, and Uber. In 2022, the company's revenue reached $250 million and grew astonishingly to $675 million (about 4.8 billion yuan) last year. Among AI startups, such revenue performance is particularly outstanding.
Alexandr once reflected that in the past eight years, from autonomous driving to ChatGPT, Scale AI has been involved in virtually every major breakthrough in the field of AI. He was selected alongside other notable figures in "Time Magazine's" list of the 100 most influential people in the AI field last year.
In the 8 years since Scale AI was founded, it has made a profound impression on the venture capital community and secured support from a large team of investors. Initially, the company quickly completed its seed and Series A financing. Notable investors included the well-known Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator and venture capital heavyweight Accel. Accel's partner even offered Scale AI his basement as a temporary office space.
In 2018, Scale AI announced the completion of a $18 million Series B round led by Index Venture. This round attracted several well-known investors, some of whom were moved to invest upon hearing about the critical importance of Scale AI's data labeling services in the field of autonomous driving.
Afterward, as Alexandr and Lucy's fame grew, so did their reputation in the industry. However, Lucy decided to leave Scale AI, choosing to retain her shares and instead founded the venture capital firm Backend Capital. In 2019, Founders Fund led Scale AI's $100 million Series C round, bringing the company's valuation to over $1 billion and officially joining the ranks of unicorns. By December 2020, Scale AI had completed a $150 million Series D round led by Tiger Fund, significantly increasing the company's valuation to $3.5 billion. In 2021, Scale AI announced yet another round, a $325 million Series E, highlighting its strong industry presence and broad influence.
Scale AI announces once again the completion of its Series F funding round, which is of astonishing scale, amounting to a staggering 1 billion USD, increasing its valuation to a new high of approximately 13.8 billion USD. This round of funding saw a star-studded lineup, covering more than 20 renowned investment firms and individual investors.
Accel, as a returning shareholder, led this round of funding, with veteran investors such as Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Coatue, Thrive Capital, and Spark Capital also continuing to increase their holdings, demonstrating their remarkable confidence and support for Scale AI. Tiger Fund, Greenoaks, Y Combinator, Wellington Management, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman all participated in follow-on investments.
Meanwhile, tech industry behemoths, including NVIDIA, Amazon, Meta, Cisco, Intel, AMD, and others, have also joined this round of investment spree. Additionally, new faces such as DFJ Growth, WCM, and ServiceNow Ventures made appearances.
Scale AI's core product focuses on providing high-quality data for AI models. The company's founder, Alexandr, passionately stated: "The data problem of artificial intelligence is the career I am dedicated to solving in my life." He believes that this round of funding will help the company accelerate the development of frontier data to lay a foundation for building general artificial intelligence.
At the same time, the AI industry is witnessing a surge of entrepreneurship among post-90s founders. On the same day that Scale AI announced the success of its funding round, China's AI rising star — The Dark Side of the Moon — also revealed its latest round of funding news, with the company's valuation reaching 3 billion USD. The company's founder, Yang Zhilin, is hailed as a leading figure in China's post-90s big model arena. Yang was directly admitted to Tsinghua University due to his exceptional abilities and quickly completed his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University under the mentorship of several authority figures in the AI field.
Another notable entrepreneurial youth is former Huawei "genius boy" Zhihuijun Peng Zhihui. Peng graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology and is also a Bilibili uploader with over a million followers. Since its inception in February 2023, his company Zhiyuan Robotics has received funding six times, becoming one of the hottest entrepreneurial projects. Furthermore, the 95-postgraduate Guo Wenjing, known for her video production software Pika, has become prominent, and her success can be seen as a microcosm of Silicon Valley's AI entrepreneurial circle.
A company comprised of only four people completed three rounds of funding within a mere six months and successfully raised their valuation to over $200 million. Among them, Guo Wenjing, a Zhejiang prodigy and the first to receive early undergraduate admission to Harvard University, not only earned a master’s degree in computer science and a bachelor's in mathematics from Harvard but also extended her academic journey to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford University.
Last April, Guo Wenjing and Chenlin Meng jointly dropped out of Stanford to develop an AI video editing tool, which quickly gained tremendous global attention. In addition, this year, several post-90s AI founders have also successfully captured the favor of the capital market.
Zhang Yueliang, the former key person in charge of the "Miaoyu" AI product, founded Muyan Zhiyu and completed four rounds of funding within half a year, accumulating close to 300 million yuan in funding. Zhang Yueliang, with his outstanding academic and professional background, graduated from Tsinghua University and held positions at Alibaba and ByteDance.
Also attracting much attention is the founder and CEO of Boxform Intelligence, Jiang Yuchen, born in 1998. He completed his undergraduate studies at Zhejiang University and worked on his Ph.D. in natural language processing at ETH Zurich. In March 2019, Jiang Yuchen founded Boxform Intelligence in Hangzhou, and the company quickly received a Pre-A round of funding led by BlueRun Ventures, joined by Westlake Ventures and the existing shareholder Oufang Angels.
Among these outstanding individuals, we also see leaders such as Zeng Guoyang of Mianbi Intelligence, Hu Yuanming of Taiji Graphics, Tian Tian of Rayli Intelligence, and Chen Jianyu of Stardom Era. Most of them have scientific and technological educational backgrounds from top universities in China and around the world. With cutting-edge technology as their breakthrough, they are sailing against the wind with devout entrepreneurship and an enduring passion and creativity, becoming leading figures of the era.
The fusion of dreams and youthful vitality has allowed these elites from prestigious institutions to make a profound impact on the world with the most advanced technology, and they are collectively creating an epic history in the AI entrepreneurship field.
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