Startups, venture capital, and tech entrepreneurship by Lucy Guo

Lucy Guo is co-founder of Backend Capital and founder of Passes, a monetization platform for digital creators. Formerly a founding team member at Scale AI and Thiel Fellow, Guo has raised more than $25 million for Passes across two funding rounds. While not directly building in crypto, her platform incorporates crypto-compatible payout rails and NFT-based fan access features. Passes supports over 2,000 creators and reported a 380 percent increase in active accounts in the first half of 2025. Guo frequently speaks on permissionless creator monetization, digital ownership, and the intersection of fintech and Web3 infrastructure.

In 2024, she advised two early-stage crypto projects focused on creator royalties and token-gated communities. Guo’s Twitter audience exceeds 270,000, and her commentary has featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, and CoinDesk. With a growing footprint in ownership-centric creator tooling, Guo contributes indirectly to the crypto ecosystem by bridging user engagement models with tokenized incentive structures.