A free life.
Article by: Wang Lu
Article source: Investment Community PE Daily
AI has created astonishing wealth.
In the latest Hurun Global Rich List, Lucy Guo made the list with a net worth of 9 billion yuan, becoming the world's richest self-made woman born in the 1990s.
Her story is a microcosm of this wave of AI: she co-founded Scale AI 10 years ago, and even though she has long since left the company, she has become one of the top 1% of richest people in the world thanks to her wildly expanding equity holdings.
Looking at the bigger picture, a grander picture of wealth is unfolding: a growing number of female entrepreneurs are rising strongly in the AI field, becoming new protagonists in the spotlight. Beyond the limelight, another path to financial freedom has also been opened up. A group of young engineers, researchers, and even interns in AI companies have achieved a leap in their lives in just a few years.
31 years old, the world's youngest female billionaire
The story of a girl born in the 1990s growing up unfolds slowly.
Lucy Guo was born in San Francisco in 1994 to a Chinese-American family; her parents were electrical engineers. Like most Chinese parents, they believed that studying hard was the right path and were very strict with her education. Tutoring, competitions, abacus practice—she was involved in almost everything.
She also displayed her geek talent early on. In her teens, she taught herself programming and earned her first money selling virtual items online. Later, she was admitted to Carnegie Mellon University to study computer science. But fate soon opened another door for her—after receiving the Thiel Scholarship, she made a bold decision: to drop out and start her own business.
In 2016, she co-founded the artificial intelligence company Scale AI with Alexandr Wang. This company later became one of the most prominent unicorns in the AI infrastructure sector.
However, just as the company was thriving, Lucy Guo chose to leave. The reason was not complicated. The two founders gradually diverged in their views on the company's development direction: Alexandr Wang valued sales and customer expansion, hoping to quickly scale up the business; while Lucy Guo believed that the company should focus more on the product and the team itself. The differences became irreconcilable, and she ultimately withdrew from day-to-day operations.
Fortunately, she did one crucial thing right: she held onto her approximately 6% stake without yielding an inch. With subsequent funding rounds, this percentage fell below 5%.
Until 2025, when Meta acquired approximately 49% of Scale AI, Lucy Guo's stake was valued at approximately $1.25 billion, placing her among the top 1% of the world's richest people.
After leaving Scale, Lucy first ventured into venture capital, founding Backend Capital, a firm focused on investing in early-stage startups. One of the firm's most successful investments was its six-figure bet on financial software company Ramp in 2020—a company now valued at $32 billion. She then went on to found the creator economy platform Passes, quickly securing over $65 million in funding.
Faced with the sudden wealth and attention, the young entrepreneur seemed quite calm: "To be honest, I still feel like that little girl. My life hasn't changed much since I got the money."
They are rising
Lucy Guo is not an isolated case. Looking at the broader picture, a growing number of female founders are emerging.
Turning to the Hurun Rich List, another name of a Chinese woman born in the 1990s also catches the eye—Shuo Wang from Northeast China. Her trajectory subtly overlaps with that of Lucy Guo; she also dropped out of MIT and returned to China to try her hand at entrepreneurship in Beijing.
In early 2019, leveraging her keen insight into the remote work trend, she founded Deel, a human resources technology company. In the ensuing years of dramatic changes, the company accurately identified the pain points of global hiring, and its valuation climbed to $17.3 billion (approximately 120 billion yuan). Today, 36-year-old Wang Shuo and Lucy Guo are both listed on the Hurun Global Rich List.
The momentum of women born after 2000 is equally formidable. A few months ago, an AI startup called Axiom Math caused a sensation in Silicon Valley. The founder is Carina Hong, a 24-year-old woman from Guangzhou.
This post-00s girl, who is born with the aura of a "genius girl", has a perfect resume: she was a frequent winner of math competitions in high school, entered MIT at the age of 17 and won honors such as the Morgan Prize; then she became a Rhodes Scholar, went to Oxford University to pursue a master's degree in neuroscience, and pursued dual doctorates in mathematics and law at Stanford University.
However, just when his academic path seemed bright, Hong Letong made a surprising decision: to drop out of Stanford and start his own business full-time.
(Image credit: MIT)
Her company, Axiom Math, is dedicated to using AI to solve extremely complex mathematical problems. Just a few months after its founding and with its product still in its early stages, Axiom Math achieved a valuation of over $300 million and completed a $64 million seed round of funding. Even more dramatically, Hong Letong successfully persuaded Ken Ono, a leading international mathematician and professor at Emory University, to resign his tenured position and join her team full-time.
Hong Letong's journey may have just begun, but this wave of deep technology initiated by Chinese women has already converged into a vast ocean in a broader business landscape.
A set of data is quite meaningful: the 2026 Hurun Global Rich List includes 285 self-made women, with China dominating at 75%.
Behind this lies a clear and profound business trajectory.
Over the past thirty years, China's previous generation of female entrepreneurs accumulated their initial wealth in traditional industries. From Luxshare Precision, led by Wang Lichun, to Lens Technology, built by Zhou Qunfei, and Longfor Group, founded by Wu Yajun, they have built up a significant presence in traditional sectors such as manufacturing and real estate with their remarkable resilience and execution, thus creating a legendary wealth empire for Chinese women.
Now, the baton has quietly been passed on. The new generation of female entrepreneurs often possesses top-tier academic backgrounds and is familiar with cutting-edge science. Wielding code and computing power, they are entering the world's most crucial arena of hard technology.
AI is producing a large number of young millionaires.
It's undeniable that the wave of wealth creation through AI is more powerful than ever before.
Looking back at this wave of large-scale AI companies, the wealth path for ordinary workers is being rewritten. Compared to internet companies, these AI companies generally allocate a larger proportion of equity to ordinary employees.
A prime example is Zhipu. Its prospectus shows that as of the end of June 2025, the company had 883 employees, of whom 452 held shares, representing 51.2%. In other words, at Zhipu, one in every two people is a shareholder.
Back in 2021, the company established two employee stock ownership platforms, "Huihui" and "Zhideng," which together hold 16.55% of the company's shares. "Huihui" covers 426 current and former employees, while "Zhideng" includes some employees and 16 full-time interns serving as algorithm consultants. Such a broad coverage of equity incentives is rare.
Based on Zhipu's current market value, if we exclude the two senior executives in "Huihui", the average book value of the remaining 424 employees' shares is approximately RMB 35 million.
A similar story happened to MiniMax.
This AI upstart, founded less than five years ago, currently has approximately 385 full-time employees, with almost all positions in technology, product, marketing, and functional roles being employee stock ownership plans. The prospectus shows that the company's average employee age is only 29, with R&D personnel accounting for over 70%; among them, 363 ordinary employees collectively hold approximately 3.41% of the total share capital after the IPO.
Financial reports show that MiniMax's employee compensation expenses reached $84.3 million (approximately RMB 580 million) in fiscal year 2025, while the total number of employees that year was 428, which translates to an average salary of nearly RMB 1.35 million per person.
Looking back at the mobile internet era, for ordinary employees to achieve a leap in wealth through stock options, they often needed to accompany the company through a long cycle of 8 to 10 years, experiencing multiple rounds of reshuffling, and waiting for the moment the listing bell to ring. However, in the AI field, this cycle has been significantly compressed. The rapid accumulation of capital, technology, and talent has caused the value of the equity held by early employees to increase several times or even dozens of times in just two or three years.
As the wave sweeps in, those caught in its current become the lucky ones. AI has not only changed the world, but has also reopened the imagination of wealth for ordinary people at an unprecedented speed.
