Edwin Chen
Founder and CEO of the AI data company Surge AI; earlier a machine-learning engineer at Twitter, Google, Facebook.
At a glance
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- Edwin Chen is an American entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Surge AI, which supplies frontier AI labs with human-written data, environments and evaluations.
- He studied mathematics, computer science and linguistics at MIT, graduating in 2008, and worked as a data scientist and machine-learning engineer at Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Google and Clarium before founding Surge in Manhattan in 2020 with his own savings.
- Surge passed $1 billion in revenue with fewer than 100 employees, bootstrapped.
Key facts
- Surge AI
- Founder and CEO; founded 2020, bootstrapped; majority owner (about 75%, September 2025)1
- Revenue
- Over $1 billion with fewer than 100 employees (as of December 2025)2
- Earlier
- Data scientist and machine-learning engineer at Twitter (from late 2011), Facebook, Dropbox, Google and Clarium1
- Education
- Mathematics, computer science and linguistics, MIT (2008)1
- Recognition
- TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI (2025); Forbes 400 (September 2025)1
Links
Sources
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