AI billionaire’s startup enters influencer field

Lucy Guo’s Passes Inc. is a platform where celebrities connect directly with fans.

- AISHA COUNTS

INFLUENCER Alyssa McKay, left, and others in Santa Monica in 2024. She uses Passes to connect with fans.

Lucy Guo got into the artificial intelligence industry early, co-founding software provider Scale AI nine years ago. It made her a billionaire by the time she was 30.

Now the Carnegie Mellon University dropout is building another business, Passes Inc., a platform where celebrities like Olivia Dunne and Bella Thorne can help turn fame into fortune by connecting directly with their fans. But this time, Guo is running into well-established competitors and legal challenges in a business where success is far from certain.

Backed by $50 million in funding since its December 2022 launch, Passes is vying in a field that’s already crowded. Patreon is known for working with podcasters, while Cameo, a former high-flier, focuses on celebrities and OnlyFans is big in porn. Passes is between those poles. It’s used mainly by influencers already popular on TikTok and Instagram, and the content tends to be edgy. Guo says its strength is service.

“We just want to be like a superfan club for creators,” Guo, Passes’ chief executive officer, said in an interview. Her aim is to provide influencers “the entire infrastructure to be a business.”

Passes’ headquarters in West Hollywood screams Tinseltown. Beyond the pink neon sign in the center of the office, there’s a bar fit for a nightclub and a floor-to-ceiling water feature. Guo’s aim is to capture the vibe of social media's biggest stars — the Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat influencers who make money by advertising products, in between sharing videos of their daily lives — and to have the facilities they need for their work.

Passes’ founder grew up building social apps and starting companies. Raised in Fremont, Calif, she started coding early, creating arcade games and virtual pet websites before studying computer science and human-computer interaction in college.