Ein 37-jähriger chinesischer Genie hat sich als "der jungste Milliardär" etabliert.

The technological revolution in AI has once again brought about a wave of wealth - creation myths.

Edwin Chen, the founder of Surge AI, a 37 - year - old Chinese - American, is about to receive a $1 billion Series A financing. After the financing, its corresponding valuation may rise to approximately $24 billion. And Edwin Chen, who holds 75% of the shares, will see his net worth soar to $18 billion.

Notably, this is Edwin Chen's first time being included in the "Forbes 400", and he has become the youngest billionaire on this year's list.

After the list was announced, the Silicon Valley venture capital circle was collectively stunned - who exactly is this Edwin Chen, who has no media coverage and no public speeches? Even when netizens dug into his LinkedIn profile, they only saw one sentence: "Building Surge AI".

It is reported that Edwin Chen has worked at Google, Facebook, and Twitter (X). In the wave of AI, he quietly founded a data annotation company, Surge. Surge may be the most low - key and most profitable unicorn in the AI circle. In less than five years since its establishment, its annual revenue has exceeded $1 billion. In a recent Forbes interview, Edwin Chen revealed that the company has been profitable almost since its inception.

The image of another legendary entrepreneur in the AI field emerges vividly.

01 Cyber Data Factory

In the current hottest generative artificial intelligence large models, data annotation companies provide a large amount of "clean and accurate" training data.

Manually labeled data has a profound impact on model performance and is the most basic and indispensable part of the AI industry. Just as NVIDIA controls the lifeline of computing power, data annotation companies control the data entry point of AI. Therefore, data annotation is jokingly referred to in the industry as the "Cyber Foxconn" and the "shovel seller" of the AI industry.

Compared with its competitor Scale AI, Surge AI is very low - key. There is no flashy interaction on the company's homepage, only a bunch of plain text introductions. The most prominent one is "Data quality determines the upper limit of ambition".

Surge claims that its method is different from the old - style data annotation model. The old - style data annotation model often hires people from less - developed countries around the world, paying them a few cents per hour to sit in front of a computer and distinguish between cats and dogs. Surge, on the other hand, has created a man - machine collaborative alternative: Data is generated and self - annotated by AI, but its performance is evaluated by humans.

In just five years since its establishment, this data annotation company, with 250 employees (including full - time, part - time, and consultants) and no external financing, achieved a revenue of $1.2 billion in 2024, exceeding Scale AI's revenue of $870 million in the same period. It has also won major clients such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and AI labs Anthropic and Mistral. Just Meta's generative AI department spent more than $150 million on Surge AI's full - process annotation services last year. By revenue, Scale AI has become the largest enterprise in the industry.

Previously, Surge founder Edwin Chen was so low - key that almost no one knew him. After media interviews, he was described as a "verbose, brilliant, and eccentric" person. Facing a $100 billion acquisition offer, he rejected it without hesitation. When praised for Surge's more efficient use of resources compared to its peers, Edwin Chen confidently responded that on the one hand, we are indeed efficient; on the other hand, many of our peers are not essentially technology companies. They are more like "labor outsourcing factories" or "outsourcing companies disguised as technology companies".

With the rapid development of the industry, Surge has a grander vision. They hope to become an enterprise leading the development of the AI industry. This means that Edwin Chen, who has been behind the scenes for many years, will have to step forward more often and position himself as a more influential thought leader.

02 Do Difficult but High - Quality Things

Different from Alexandr Wang, who became famous at a young age and dropped out of school to start a business, Edwin Chen is ten years older. After graduating from MIT, he worked at companies such as Google, Dropbox, Facebook, and Twitter. When he started his business in 2020, Edwin was already 33 years old. But like Alexandr Wang, he is also of Chinese descent and an absolute genius.

Edwin was born in 1988. In the 1990s, his parents immigrated from Taiwan to the United States and ran a Chinese - Thai - American restaurant. His childhood was spent in the back kitchen of his family's restaurant. While his parents worked more than ten hours a day, he did his homework next to the cash register. In the eighth grade, he studied calculus. "The Power of Calculus" completely changed the course of his life - "When I discovered that mathematics could explain the laws of the universe, it was like finding the codebook of life."

At the age of 17, Edwin entered MIT to study mathematics, linguistics, and computer science. After graduation, he first worked in the hedge fund Clarium Capital on algorithmic work and then worked at Twitter, Google, and Facebook. The work in multiple positions involved content review and recommendation algorithms.

When he was in charge of the search model at Twitter, the team needed to annotate more than 50,000 merchants. The results returned by the outsourcing contractor were full of loopholes. There was even a low - level mistake of mislabeling a coffee shop as a hospital, forcing the team to do the annotation themselves and wasting several months.

Later, when leading the team to develop the Facebook content recommendation algorithm, after a model that cost tens of millions of dollars was launched, the user retention rate decreased instead of increasing. He slammed the table at the review meeting: the outsourcing team mislabeled "sarcastic posts" as "positive content" and couldn't understand metaphorical expressions.

Edwin truly realized the importance of data annotation and found that relying on cheap labor for annotation simply couldn't meet the actual needs. Completely tired of the "utterly useless" data, in 2020, he quit his high - paying job and left Twitter to found Surge AI. He wrote the first version of Surge AI in a San Francisco apartment in just one month.

Different from old - style annotation companies, Surge AI chose a more difficult path from the very beginning, taking the route of "high - quality annotation" and focusing on quality and expert matching. He hopes that AI can truly learn "the complexity of humanity and the richness of human nature" and has invited professors from Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard to train the AI. This sets it apart from Scale AI, which focuses on scale and automation.

In terms of business, many of Surge's first - batch clients were obtained through his self - established "Data Science Blog", but he refused to disclose the specific list.

In terms of financing, Edwin is more restrained. At the beginning of his entrepreneurship, he made an "anti - Silicon Valley" decision: not to take VC money. He built Surge, which is now valued at $24 billion, with his own savings from working at Google. He said, "One of the reasons we self - financed is that I've always hated the status quo in Silicon Valley." He hates the idea of raising a large amount of money and then having to spend it, and describes typical VC - backed Silicon Valley startups as "get - rich - quick schemes". It is rumored that Edwin has also set three iron rules: no external financing, no burning of money, and no acceptance of simple orders.

Within less than 12 months after Surge's product was launched, its revenue exceeded eight figures. Then it accurately caught the wave of large language models and reached cooperation with giants such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. In an interview, Edwin Chen revealed that the company has been profitable almost since its inception. Because it doesn't need money, doesn't need sales promotion, and doesn't need to compromise on profits, Surge, which is built around "privacy first, security first", has become the preferred supplier for institutions such as the medical and government sectors that attach the most importance to AI ethics and data governance.

"AGI will not be born from a pile of wrong data. We need to solve truly complex problems and achieve high - quality data code input." To this end, Surge has specifically built an elite network called Surge Force. To join this network, in addition to having a strong professional background, all annotators also need to submit five trial writing questions and can only join the team after being approved by another senior annotator. It's even more difficult than getting into an Ivy League school.

03 Innovation Is King

Edwin Chen leading Surge to break through and becoming the youngest billionaire on the Forbes list is just a microcosm of the current AI wealth - creation wave. Behind this is a global technological revolution, and more and more young people brave in innovation are making their debut on the world stage.

Overseas, the AI search engine company Perplexity, founded by three post - 90s entrepreneurs, has just received a commitment of $200 million in financing, with a valuation reaching $20 billion; the French startup Mistral AI is about to complete a €2 billion financing, and the company's valuation is as high as €12 billion. The masterminds behind it are also three highly intelligent post - 90s entrepreneurs.

More importantly, on the world stage, Chinese people like Edwin Chen have become the backbone of technological innovation. In the "Time" magazine's list of the top 100 AI figures in the world in 2025, six Chinese people, including Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, Wang Xingxing, the founder of Unitree Robotics, and Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, hold up half of the list. Among the innovators focusing on the cross - breakthrough in AI and vertical fields, in addition to Edwin Chen, the founder of Surge AI introduced in this article, there are also Peng Jun, the founder of Pony.ai, and two other Chinese people on the list.

On the domestic AI stage, there are also full of passionate young technology enthusiasts, such as Peng Zhihui, the "Genius Teenager of Huawei", Song Yachen of TenSorflow, Yang Zhilin of Kimi, etc. A group of young people are walking towards the center of the technology stage. They are all post - 90s, once considered the "young people who can't endure hardship" and the "lost generation", but they are shouldering the banner of Chinese technology, using innovation as a spear and talent as a shield to touch the most cutting - edge global technology and keep in sync with the world with their strength.

Looking at the world, the era belongs to innovators and attackers has just begun!

This article is from the WeChat official account "Benyuan Finance", author: Benyuan Finance, published by 36Kr with permission.