Surge CEO & Co-Founder, Edwin Chen: Scaling to $1BN+ in Revenue with NO Funding
20VC
Jul 21, 2025
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Edwin Chen is the Founder and CEO of Surge. Founded in 2020, Surge has scaled to $1BN+ in revenue with zero external funding. At the same time, their competitor, Scale.ai raised over $1.3BN to reach $850M ARR. Today, Surge have the world’s largest model providers as customers and have just 120 employees.
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In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
Why 90% of Big Tech Is Wasting Time on Useless Problems
How Surge Kills Meetings and Still Moves 10x Faster
100x Engineers Are Real
Founding Surge AI
“No Sales Team, No PR, No BS”
The Real Reason AGI Might Take Until 2040
Why the Real Bottleneck in AI Isn’t Compute or Models
Will Synthetic Data Kill Human Labelling?
The Price of a $10B Company?
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