[imagesource: Ian Tuttle For Delivered]

It served Alexandr Wang rather well to drop out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at 19 to co-found software company Scale AI.

He was studying machine learning, but then he met his company’s future co-founder Lucy Guo in the summer after his freshman year and his life really began.

With an investment secured from start-up funder Y Combinator to get the wheels rolling, he and Guo got to work on Scale, a company that now helps America’s Air Force and Army use artificial intelligence to mine through huge amounts of data.

At the time he had told his parents “it was just going to be a thing I did for the summer,” Wang says via Forbes, but he never actually went back to school.

Now, at the age of 25, having built his six-year-old San Francisco-based company up, Wang has landed himself the title of the youngest self-made billionaire.

Feet up for Wang:

Image: Christie Hemm Klok / Forbes

His work has become integral to the US government’s needs:

Scale’s technology analyzes satellite images much faster than human analysts to determine how much damage Russian bombs are causing in Ukraine. It’s useful not just for the military.

More than 300 companies, including General Motors and Flexport, use Scale, which Wang started when he was 19, to help them pan gold from rivers of raw information—millions of shipping documents, say, or raw footage from self-driving cars.

“Every industry is sitting on huge amounts of data,” Wang says, who appeared on the Forbes Under 30 list in 2018. “Our goal is to help them unlock the potential of the data and supercharge their businesses with AI.”

Having grown up with parents who were physicists and “in the shadows of America’s nuclear weapons program”, his career path was perhaps somewhat determined from an early age.

But not without some hard grafting, per Wion News:

As a kid, Wang used to compete in math and coding coemptions just to secure a free ticket to Disney World. Though he didn’t win the competition, it made a lasting impression on him and pushed him to be a genius coder.

His passion landed him full-time coding work at the question-and-answer site Quora when he turned 17. It is here where he would meet his company’s future co-founder.

These days Scale, generating an estimated $100 million in revenue per year, is valued at $7,3 billion, according to Forbes.

Wang’s estimated 15% stake is worth north of $1 billion and lands him the coveted title of the world’s newest youngest self-made billionaire.

Just below him is Pedro Franceschi, a 25-year-old Brazilian co-founder of credit card company Brex.

[source:forbes&wion]