Lucy Guo — SPARQNOW

At-a-Glance

Recognized as the world's youngest female self-made billionaire as of 2025, due to her stake in Scale AI.
Founder of Passes, a social platform for creators launched in 2022, which raised a $40 million Series A in 2024.
Co-founder of Scale AI in 2016, where she led operations and product design efforts.
Founder of Backend Capital, a venture capital firm launched in 2019 that funds early-stage engineering startups.
Recipient of the Thiel Fellowship in 2014, leading her to drop out of Carnegie Mellon University.
Interned at Facebook and was the first female designer at Snapchat, where she helped develop Snap Maps.

Biography

Lucy Guo is an American entrepreneur and engineer, born in October 1994 and raised in Fremont, California. She began coding at a young age, teaching herself programming and earning money by developing bots for the online game Neopets. She enrolled in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University but dropped out in 2014 after being selected for the Thiel Fellowship, a grant supporting young entrepreneurs.