37-year-old ex-Google employee created $1 billion business without investors

The rapid rise of Surge AI company in the data annotation industry for artificial intelligence is impressive! 37-year-old founder Edwin Chen previously worked at Dropbox, Google and Twitter. And then, relying exclusively on his own funds, he built his business. Which serves the most influential players — Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.

And Surge AI achieved cool financial indicators. Annual revenue exceeded $1 billion! That’s $130 million more than the nearest competitor Scale AI. Which attracted massive investments from venture funds. Even more amazing is that Surge AI was profitable from the first days of operation!

The secret of success lies in “elite” positioning. The company charges prices 100-400% higher than Scale AI. But guarantees impeccable quality. It’s exactly to them that OpenAI entrusted the fine-tuning of their models, and Anthropic uses their expertise for evaluating artificial intelligence safety.

Behind this stands a team of 110 high-class specialists working in New York and San Francisco. And essentially, Edwin Chen managed to create the gold standard in an industry where data annotation quality directly affects artificial intelligence performance.