Scale AI
Headquarters
San Francisco, CAFounded
2016CEO / Founder
Francis deSouzaEmployees
501-1000Funding
Series D+ — $14.9BProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.6/10Website
scale.com
Profile updated
About Scale AI
Scale AI provides data infrastructure and services for artificial intelligence development, founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo in San Francisco. The company operates data labeling and annotation platforms that help organizations prepare training datasets for machine learning models.
Scale AI serves AI laboratories, government agencies, and Fortune 500 companies with data preparation, model evaluation, and AI safety services. The company's platform handles various data types including images, text, audio, and video for applications in autonomous vehicles, natural language processing, and computer vision. Notable customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, OpenAI, and General Motors.
The company has raised approximately $602 million across multiple funding rounds, including a $325 million Series C in 2021 that valued the company at $7.3 billion. Scale AI employs several hundred people and has expanded its services to include AI model evaluation and red teaming capabilities for large language models.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Scale AI
All products by Scale AI reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Scale AI
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Scale AI's product on their own terms. They disagreed by 1.8 points — The Skeptic was the hardest to convince, The Domain Strategist the most positive.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Scale AI competes with, and how they differ.
Runs a comparable RLHF/data-annotation workforce (~1M annotators) but has stayed bootstrapped with no outside investors, reporting $1.2B in 2024 revenue and picking up work from Scale's own customers (OpenAI, Google, xAI) after Meta took its stake in Scale.
Pairs a self-serve annotation platform with the Alignerr expert network (2.6M+ contributors across 200+ domains), targeting frontier labs with domain-specialist training signals rather than Scale's larger generalist annotator workforce.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedRuns an expert-labor marketplace paying an average $113/hour across 300+ professional fields (law, medicine, engineering) plus its own APEX model benchmarks, competing for frontier-lab budgets with a smaller, higher-skill labor pool than Scale's broader crowd.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedA publicly traded (ASX: APX) crowdsourced annotation vendor with roughly 1M workers across 130+ countries and $273M in 2023 revenue, competing on price and language coverage rather than Scale's frontier-AI and defense focus.
Takes the opposite approach to Scale's human-in-the-loop model: Snorkel's programmatic labeling generates training data from code-defined rules rather than annotator workforces, competing for the same enterprise data-preparation budgets.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Scale AI's history, with sources.
- Milestone
Appoints Francis deSouza as CEO, succeeding interim chief Jason Droege
Scale named former Illumina CEO Francis deSouza as its next Chief Executive Officer, effective August 10, 2026; interim CEO Jason Droege stays on to support the transition.
scale.com - Acquisition
Acquires ICG Solutions, a defense data-streaming firm
Scale acquired ICG Solutions, a 2010-founded national-security analytics firm whose LUX platform ingests and correlates real-time data streams, to build an end-to-end intelligence offering for defense and intelligence customers.
scale.com - Milestone
Lays off staff, citing overhiring and unprofitability after the Meta deal
Weeks after Meta's investment, Scale AI cut jobs and said the company was not yet profitable, attributing the reductions to prior overhiring and shifting market conditions.
businessinsider.com - Funding
Meta invests ~$14.3B for a 49% non-voting stake
Meta acquired a roughly 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI for approximately $14.3 billion, one of the largest AI-related outside investments to date, with Scale remaining a nominally independent company.
nytimes.com - Milestone
Jason Droege promoted to CEO as founder Alexandr Wang departs for Meta
Scale promoted chief strategy officer Jason Droege to Chief Executive Officer after founder-CEO Alexandr Wang left to lead Meta's new superintelligence lab following Meta's investment in Scale.
cnbc.com - Milestone
Sued for alleged wage theft amid $13.8B valuation
Scale AI, then valued at $13.8 billion, was sued in a proposed class action alleging widespread wage theft against its contracted data-labeling workforce.
sfgate.com - Funding
Series F — $1B at a $13.8B valuation, led by Accel
Scale raised $1 billion in primary and secondary financing led by existing investor Accel at a $13.8 billion valuation, with Amazon and Meta joining as new investors alongside NVIDIA and prior backers.
scale.com - Funding
Series E — $325M led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Tiger Global
Scale raised $325 million in a Series E round to expand its AI data-annotation and model-development platform across autonomous vehicles, government and enterprise customers.
scale.com - Funding
Series D — $155M at a $3.5B+ valuation, led by Tiger Global
Scale raised $155 million led by Tiger Global at a post-money valuation north of $3.5 billion, funding hiring and new-market expansion.
scale.com - Funding
Series C — $100M at a $1B+ valuation, led by Founders Fund
Scale raised $100 million led by Founders Fund at a valuation over $1 billion, reaching unicorn status on the strength of demand for labeled training data.
scale.com - Funding
Series B — $18M led by Index Ventures
Scale raised an $18 million Series B led by Index Ventures, with Index partner Mike Volpi joining the board.
scale.com - Founded
Founded by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo as a Y Combinator (S16) startup
Scale AI was founded in May 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo to provide labeled training data for computer vision and, later, generative AI.
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