The richest woman in her 90s is born.

The wealth - creating power of AI is astonishing.

In the newly released "Hurun Global Rich List", Lucy Guo, with a net worth of 9 billion yuan, made it onto the list and became the world's richest self - made female entrepreneur among those born in the 1990s.

Her story is a microcosm of this wave of AI: She co - founded Scale AI 10 years ago. Even though she left the company long ago, thanks to the rapidly expanding value of her equity, she has joined the top 1% of the world's richest people.

Looking at the broader picture, a more grand wealth landscape is unfolding: More and more female entrepreneurs are rising strongly in the AI field and becoming the new protagonists in the spotlight. Beyond the limelight, another path to financial freedom has also been opened up. Young engineers, researchers, and even interns in a number of AI companies have achieved a remarkable transformation in their fates within just a few years.

At 31, the world's youngest female billionaire

The growth story of a girl born in the 1990s unfolds slowly.

In 1994, Lucy Guo was born into a Chinese - American family in San Francisco. Her parents are electrical engineers. Just like most Chinese parents, they believed that studying hard was the right way and were very strict with her education. Tutoring, competitions, and abacus practice were all part of her life.

She also showed her geek talent at an early age. As a teenager, she taught herself programming and sold virtual items online, earning her first pot of gold. Later, she was admitted to Carnegie Mellon University to study computer science. However, fate soon opened another door for her - after receiving the Thiel Fellowship, she made a bold decision: to drop out of school and start a business.

In 2016, she co - founded the artificial intelligence company Scale AI with Alexandr Wang. This company later became one of the most eye - catching unicorns in the AI infrastructure field.

However, when the company was booming, Lucy Guo chose to leave. The reason is not complicated. The two founders gradually had differences in the company's development direction: Alexandr Wang focused more on sales and customer expansion, hoping to quickly expand the business scale; while Lucy Guo believed that the company should invest more energy in the product and the team itself. Since the differences were difficult to reconcile, she finally withdrew from the daily operations.

Fortunately, she did one crucial thing right: She firmly held onto about 6% of her shares. After subsequent financing dilutions, this proportion dropped below 5%.

By 2025, when Meta acquired about 49% of Scale AI's shares, the valuation of Lucy Guo's shares soared to about $1.25 billion, and she joined the top 1% of the world's richest people.

After leaving Scale, Lucy first ventured into the VC field and founded a venture capital firm, Backend Capital, which focuses on early - stage startup investments. One of the most successful investments of this firm was a six - figure bet on the fintech company Ramp in 2020 - the company is currently valued at $32 billion. After that, she personally founded the creator economy platform Passes and quickly secured over $65 million in financing.

Facing the sudden wealth and attention, this young entrepreneur seems quite calm: "To be honest, I still feel like that little girl. My life hasn't changed much after getting rich."

They are on the rise

Lucy Guo is by no means an isolated case. Looking at a broader scope, more and more female founders are emerging.

In the Hurun list, another Chinese female born in the 1990s also catches people's attention - Shuo Wang from Northeast China. There is a subtle overlap in her trajectory with Lucy Guo. She also dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and returned to Beijing to start a business.

In early 2019, with a keen insight into the trend of remote work, she founded the human resources technology company Deel. In the following years of changes, this company hit the pain points of global employment, and its valuation soared to $17.3 billion (about 120 billion yuan). Now, at 36, Shuo Wang and Lucy Guo are on the "Hurun Global Rich List" together.

The 00s generation females are also very impressive. A few months ago, an AI startup called Axiom Math caused a stir in Silicon Valley. The founder is 24 - year - old Carina Hong from Guangzhou.

This 00s girl with the aura of a "genius girl" has a perfect resume: She was a frequent winner in the Olympiad math competitions in high school. She entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at 17 and won honors such as the Morgan Prize. Then she became a Rhodes Scholar and went to the University of Oxford to pursue a master's degree in neuroscience. She is also pursuing a dual doctorate in mathematics and law at Stanford University.

However, when her academic path seemed bright, Carina Hong made a decision that surprised the outside world: She dropped out of Stanford to start a business full - time.

(Photo source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Her company, Axiom Math, is committed to using AI to solve extremely complex mathematical problems. Just a few months after its establishment, when the product was still in the early stage, Axiom Math was valued at over $300 million and completed a $64 million seed - round financing. More dramatically, Carina Hong successfully persuaded Ken Ono, a world - class mathematician and a professor at Emory University, to quit his tenured position and join her team full - time.

Carina Hong's journey may have just begun, but the wave of deep - tech started by Chinese women has already converged into an ocean in the broader business landscape.

A set of data is quite meaningful: There are 285 self - made women on the "Hurun Global Rich List 2026", and China accounts for 75% of them.

Behind this is a clear and far - reaching business context.

In the past three decades, the previous generation of Chinese female entrepreneurs completed their initial wealth accumulation in traditional industries. From Lixun Precision led by Wang Lichun, to Lens Technology built by Zhou Qunfei, and Longfor Group founded by Wu Yajun, they, with amazing resilience and execution ability, established a firm foothold in traditional fields such as manufacturing and real estate and wrote the wealth legend of Chinese women.

Now, the baton has been quietly passed. The new generation of female entrepreneurs often have top - notch academic backgrounds and are familiar with cutting - edge science. Armed with code and computing power, they are entering the most core hard - tech arena in the world.

AI produces young billionaires

One can't help but sigh that the wealth - creating wave of AI is more powerful than ever.

Looking back at this wave of large - model development, the wealth path for employees is being rewritten. Compared with Internet companies, these AI enterprises generally allocate a larger proportion of equity to ordinary employees.

A typical example is Zhipu. According to the prospectus, as of the end of June 2025, the company had 883 employees, and 452 of them held shares, accounting for 51.2%. In other words, in Zhipu, one out of every two employees is a shareholder.

As early as 2021, the company established two employee shareholding platforms, "Huihui" and "Zhideng", which together hold 16.55% of the company's shares. Among them, "Huihui" covers 426 current and former employees; "Zhideng" includes some employees and 16 full - time interns who serve as algorithm consultants. The wide coverage of equity incentives is rare.

Based on Zhipu's current market value, if we exclude the two executives in "Huihui", the average book value of the shares held by the remaining 424 employees is about 35 million yuan.

A similar story also happened to MiniMax.

This AI up - and - comer, which has been established for less than five years, currently has about 385 full - time employees. Almost all employees in technical, product, marketing, and functional positions hold shares. The prospectus shows that the average age of the company's employees is only 29, and R & D personnel account for more than 70%. Among them, 363 ordinary employees hold about 3.41% of the total shares after the IPO.

The financial report shows that in the fiscal year 2025, MiniMax's employee salary expenditure reached $84.3 million (about 580 million yuan), and the total number of employees that year was 428. Calculated, the average salary per employee was nearly 1.35 million yuan.

Looking back at the mobile Internet era, for ordinary employees to achieve a wealth leap through stock options, they often had to accompany the company through a long cycle of 8 to 10 years, go through multiple rounds of reshuffling, and wait for the company to go public. However, in the AI field, this cycle has been greatly shortened. With the rapid aggregation of capital, technology, and talent, the value of the equity held by early employees has increased several times or even dozens of times in just two or three years.

As the wave sweeps in, those in it become lucky ones. AI has not only changed the world but also opened up the wealth imagination space for ordinary people at an unprecedented speed.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Investment World" (ID: pedaily2012), author: Wang Lu, published by 36Kr with authorization.