Portrait of Edwin Chen

Rank #158

Edwin Chen

Net worth $18.0B

Artificial intelligence · United States

Born
Dec 01, 1987
Age
38
Source
Artificial intelligence
Residence
New York, New York
Citizenship
United States
Marital status
Children
0
Education

Net worth over time

Biography

  • Edwin Chen is the CEO of Surge AI, which he founded in 2020 to help companies label data to train AI.
  • Surge generated $1.2 billion in 2024 revenue from customers like Google and AI lab Anthropic.
  • Notably, Surge claims it has not yet raised any outside funding; Chen owns an estimated 75% of the company.
  • Before founding Surge, the Florida native worked for Twitter, Google, Facebook and Peter Thiel's hedge fund Clarium.
  • Chen attended MIT, where he studied math, computer science and linguistics.
  • At MIT, Chen researched how to decode an Incan language expressed via knots tied in rope.