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Scale AI

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Scale AI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo. It supplies data collection, data labeling, human feedback, model evaluation, and applied AI systems to commercial and government customers. The company began as an interface for outsourcing human tasks and later concentrated on the data and evaluation work used to develop machine learning systems.[1][2]

In June 2025, Meta Platforms made a non-voting minority investment in Scale. Scale said the transaction valued the company at more than $29 billion, while independent reporting described a $14.3 billion investment for a 49% interest.[8][10][29] Meta's regulatory filing used a different accounting measure: it recorded $13.79 billion of the total consideration as a non-marketable equity investment.[9] The transaction was an investment rather than an acquisition of Scale, and the valuation attached to it is not evidence of a later market value.

Wang left Scale to join Meta as part of the deal, and chief strategy officer Jason Droege led the company as interim chief executive from June 2025. On July 30, 2026, Scale's board appointed Francis deSouza, then chief operating officer of Google Cloud and previously chief executive of the genomics company Illumina, as chief executive effective August 10, 2026. Scale's announcement described Wang as the company's founder and chairman of the board.[8][24][25]

History

Scale went through Y Combinator's Summer 2016 batch.[40] Its launch post on the Y Combinator blog described an application programming interface through which companies could send manual tasks such as data extraction, phone calls, and categorization to human contractors. The founders said Scale hired the contractors and performed quality control on their work so that customers could trust the first answer.[1] As demand for annotated training data grew, the company focused on datasets for computer vision, autonomous vehicles, and other machine-learning applications.[2]

In December 2020, Scale announced a $155 million Series D financing, led by Tiger Global, at a post-money valuation above $3.5 billion. The same announcement described Nucleus, a dataset-management and model-testing product that Scale had launched in August 2020, and disclosed the acquisition of Helia AI, a team with expertise in applying AI to real-time video and in the supporting AI infrastructure.[2] Scale acquired sensor-data search company SiaSearch in November 2021. Financial terms were not disclosed, and Wang said the SiaSearch team would be folded into the Nucleus effort.[3]

In May 2024, Scale closed a $1 billion Series F transaction at a $13.8 billion valuation, led by existing investor Accel. The company described the financing as a mixture of primary and secondary transactions.[4] In April 2026, Scale announced the acquisition of ICG Solutions, a defense-technology company specializing in real-time streaming-data analytics, and said ICG would initially operate as a wholly owned subsidiary.[5]

2025 and 2026

The Meta transaction in June 2025 was followed by customer departures, a July 2025 restructuring, and a change of chief executive, described in the Leadership and Meta investment sections below. In September 2025, Droege introduced a new company mission at an all-hands meeting, "to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions," replacing the Wang-era goal to "strengthen human sovereignty," according to a Scale spokesperson quoted by CNBC.[31]

Also in September 2025, Scale sued the rival data company Mercor and Eugene Ling, its former head of engagement management, in federal court in San Francisco. The complaint alleged that Ling downloaded more than 100 customer strategy documents and other proprietary files to a personal Google Drive while in contact with Mercor. Mercor co-founder Surya Midha said the company had "no interest in any of Scale's trade secrets."[35] Scale filed a stipulation of voluntary dismissal with prejudice on January 2, 2026, and the case was closed.[36]

In a January 2026 letter, Droege said 2025 had been Scale's strongest financial year, with more than $1 billion in new business across its data and applications units and nearly half of all new bookings coming in the fourth quarter. He said the data business was profitable, the applications business had more than doubled its revenue in the second half of 2025, and Scale expected applications revenue to roughly double again in 2026. He also said Scale had hired more than 500 people during 2025 and that its international public-sector revenue had doubled.[27] These are the company's own figures. In November 2025, chief financial officer Dennis Cinelli told CNBC that Scale had about $1 billion on its balance sheet and did not need to raise money soon; a spokesperson had earlier told CNBC that Scale generated close to $1 billion in revenue in 2024.[31]

Scale marked its tenth anniversary in May 2026. Droege wrote that the company had applied 15 billion human decisions to train AI models, developed AI across 150 languages and locales, paid more than $1 billion to its contributors, and served more than 700 customers.[28] In May and July 2026, Scale signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Energy and then joined the department's consortium for the Genesis Mission, a federal program to apply AI and advanced computing to scientific data from the national laboratories.[33][34]

Leadership

PeriodPersonRoleNotes
2016 to June 2025Alexandr WangCo-founder and chief executiveLeft to join Meta, where he became its first Chief AI Officer and leads Meta Superintelligence Labs.[8][38]
June 2025 to August 2026Jason DroegeInterim chief executiveJoined Scale in September 2024 as chief strategy officer; previously a founder of Uber Eats and a venture partner at Benchmark.[8][24]
From August 10, 2026Francis deSouzaChief executiveAppointed by the board on July 30, 2026.[24]
From June 2025Alexandr WangDirector; described as chairman in July 2026Scale said in June 2025 that Wang would remain a director; its July 2026 announcement quoted him as "Scale AI Founder and Chairman of the Board."[8][24]
2022 to January 2026Dennis CinelliChief financial officerGave his first public interview as CFO to CNBC in November 2025; left to become chief financial officer of Paramount Skydance, effective January 15, 2026.[31][43]

Expanded article table

Scale's board named Droege interim chief executive when Wang departed on June 12, 2025. In a letter to customers, employees, and investors on June 18, 2025, Droege wrote that Scale remained "an independent company" and that the Meta deal was "not a pivot or a winding down."[8][26] He led the company for about 14 months, through the July 2025 layoffs and the 2025 results described above.[13][27]

Scale announced deSouza's appointment on July 30, 2026. According to the company, deSouza had most recently been chief operating officer and president of security products at Google Cloud. Before that he was president and chief executive of Illumina, where Scale said revenue grew to more than $4.5 billion; earlier he was president of products and services at Symantec and founded two companies that were acquired by Microsoft and Symantec.[24] deSouza resigned as Illumina's chief executive in June 2023, weeks after the activist investor Carl Icahn failed to remove him from the company's board.[39] Axios, which first described him as a former Google Cloud executive, corrected its story to say that he was still Google Cloud's chief operating officer at the time of the announcement and that his last day there was August 7, 2026.[25] Scale said Droege would work with deSouza "over the coming months" on the transition.[24]

deSouza told Axios that organizations "want help realizing" the potential of AI "and deploying AI responsibly and reliably." Axios reported that Scale's applications business was on track to overtake its data business within 18 months, citing the company.[25] In Scale's announcement, deSouza said his focus would be "getting Scale's solutions into more businesses and governments, delivering the best data for AI labs, and showing our value through provable outcomes."[24]

Business and research

Scale's core business combines software with human work to create and manage training and evaluation data. Its services have included labeling images, text, voice, and video, collecting expert-written examples, comparing model outputs, and preparing datasets for model development.[2][3][10] For large language models, human comparisons and corrections can be used in post-training methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback. The company also develops systems for enterprises and public agencies, including tools for deploying and evaluating models on restricted government networks.[6][16]

Scale describes itself as having two core businesses: providing data for frontier AI models and building applications on top of them.[24] As of September 2026, Scale's website listed three products: the Scale data engine, the Scale GenAI Portfolio (SGP), and Scale Donovan.[37] Scale describes SGP as a platform for building, deploying, evaluating, and improving AI agents: it connects to enterprise data sources, runs inside a customer's own cloud on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, works with models from several providers, and records an audit trail for agents in production.[37] Droege said the enterprise unit added customers including Mayo Clinic, BP, and Allianz in the fourth quarter of 2025, and that Scale delivered more than 150,000 hours of data to physical AI and robotics companies and onboarded 10 new robotics customers in 2025.[27]

In September 2026, NVIDIA said Scale was working with it to incorporate NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform technologies into the agentic infrastructure layer of the Scale GenAI Portfolio, and listed Scale among the more than 100 organizations working with the platform's technologies at its September 28, 2026 launch. Francis deSouza, identified in the release as Scale's CEO, said Scale was using the platform's reference design to build agentic AI systems for enterprise and government customers "with isolation, policy enforcement and auditability built in from the start."[23]

Scale launched its Safety, Evaluation, and Alignment Lab in 2023 and expanded the research group as Scale Labs in March 2026. The company described the expanded program as covering model capabilities, agentic and multimodal systems, post-training, deployment, and AI risk evaluation.[6] Scale said the lab introduced 15 new benchmarks and published more than 450 evaluations across more than 50 models in 2025;[27] benchmarks developed under SEAL, whose results appear on the SEAL leaderboards, include SWE-Bench Pro and MCP-Atlas.[6] A peer-reviewed Nature paper published in January 2026 credits the Center for AI Safety, Scale AI, and a contributor consortium with developing Humanity's Last Exam, a 2,500-question, multimodal benchmark of closed-ended academic questions. The paper says the two organizations jointly designed the dataset premise and pipeline and provided funding, infrastructure, and review resources.[7]

Scale has also argued for more government testing of frontier models. In a September 25, 2026 post, deSouza wrote that the federal government's ability to evaluate frontier models "has not kept pace with the companies building them" and called for an accountable federal official, pre-deployment evaluation, and dedicated funding. He noted that the President had requested $27 million for CAISI, the government's frontier AI testing center, for fiscal year 2027, while House appropriators had proposed up to $15 million.[42]

Public descriptions of Scale's products and research should not be read as independent validation of performance. Product scope changes over time, and operational figures such as the size of Scale's contributor network, the number of human decisions processed, or the revenue attributed to individual product lines are Scale's own statements rather than audited disclosures.

Meta investment and governance

Scale announced the Meta transaction on June 12, 2025. It said Meta would hold a minority of Scale's outstanding equity, the companies would expand their commercial relationship, and some proceeds would be distributed to shareholders and vested equity holders. Wang joined Meta's AI organization, and Scale said he would remain a director. Scale's board appointed chief strategy officer Jason Droege as interim chief executive officer.[8]

The sources describe the transaction using related but non-identical figures:

MeasureWhat the source says
Transaction valuationScale said the investment valued it at more than $29 billion.[8]
Reported investment and ownershipThe Associated Press reported $14.3 billion for a 49% interest.[10] A Scale spokesperson told CNBC that Meta would have a 49% stake but no voting power.[29]
Meta's accounting disclosureMeta reported acquiring a non-voting minority and classified $13.79 billion of the total consideration as a non-marketable equity investment under the measurement alternative.[9]

Expanded article table

Meta's filing said it used that accounting treatment because it did not have significant influence over Scale's operations.[9] That is an accounting conclusion, not a statement that no commercial or governance conflicts could arise. Scale separately said it remained independent, would not give Meta access to internal systems or customer-confidential information, and would use recusal and conflict-of-interest procedures for Wang's board role.[11] Those safeguards are Scale's representations.

The investment affected customer perceptions. Reuters reported in June 2025, citing five people familiar with the matter, that Google, Scale's largest customer, planned to end its Scale relationship and had held conversations with several competitors; one source said Google had planned to pay Scale about $200 million that year.[12] This was a reported plan, not proof that every proposed transition was completed. An OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC on June 18, 2025 that OpenAI had been winding down its work with Scale over the previous six to 12 months and that the decision was not influenced by the Meta partnership.[30] CNBC later reported that Google and xAI had also paused work with Scale after the deal, according to multiple media reports, and that in November 2025 OpenAI, Google, and xAI were not listed as customers on Scale's website while Meta was.[31]

In July 2025, Scale cut about 200 employees, approximately 14% of staff, and cut ties with about 500 contractors, according to Bloomberg reporting summarized by TechCrunch. Droege's internal memo attributed the restructuring to expanding the core data-labeling business too quickly and said the company would add staff in enterprise and government units.[13] By November 2025, Cinelli told CNBC that the data business had grown every month since the Meta deal, and Scale said it was hiring for 200 new roles and expanding its offices in New York, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, and London.[31]

Government and defense work

Scale has received United States defense work involving annotated datasets, model evaluation, and decision-support software. Contract ceiling, award value, and money obligated are different measures and should not be treated as interchangeable.

DateRecordFinancial scope
September 2020The U.S. Army Contracting Command awarded Scale a firm-fixed-price research contract to develop methods for producing high-quality annotated AI datasets for the Department of Defense.[14]The contract's face value was $90,865,236; $16,472,937 was obligated at award.[14]
March 2025The Defense Innovation Unit awarded Scale a prototype contract for Thunderforge, a system intended to support operational and theater-level military planning. The announcement also named Anduril and Microsoft as technology participants.[15]The public announcement did not state a dollar value.[15]
August 2025The Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground awarded Scale a contract for research and development services covering data operations, Scale's platforms (the Data Engine, Generative AI Platform, and Donovan), and engineering support.[32]Scale announced a value of $99 million.[32]
September 2025The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office entered a five-year agreement for access to Scale's data, evaluation, and deployment platforms, which Scale said it would also offer on secret and top secret networks.[16]Axios reported a $100 million ceiling and a $40.7 million initial project commitment.[16]
May 2026The Defense Department increased the ceiling of that production Other Transaction Agreement after Scale said demand across the department had exceeded the original ceiling.[17]The ceiling rose from $100 million to $500 million. A ceiling is a maximum potential value, not an amount already paid or obligated.[17]

Expanded article table

Scale said in January 2026 that the Pentagon had awarded it two major contracts totaling nearly $200 million in 2025 and that it continued to lead Thunderforge with Anduril and Microsoft.[27] The April 2026 purchase of ICG Solutions, whose LUX product ingests and correlates streaming data for defense and intelligence users, was presented by Scale as a way to integrate ICG's technology with its agentic platform for national-security customers.[5]

The Defense Innovation Unit described Thunderforge as AI-assisted planning and decision-support infrastructure.[15]

Contractor workforce and labor disputes

Human contributors perform much of the annotation and evaluation work behind Scale's services. A 2023 Washington Post investigation of Remotasks workers in the Philippines reported that 34 of 36 current and former workers interviewed had experienced delayed, reduced, or cancelled payments, and described limited avenues for recourse. A Scale spokesperson said the Remotasks pay system "is continually improving" and that "delays or interruptions to payments are exceedingly rare."[18] The report documented disputed working conditions; it did not establish a verified global headcount for Scale's contributors.

Fairwork's 2025 Cloudwork Ratings gave Remotasks 2 points out of 10, awarding points for measures intended to mitigate overwork and health and safety risks. Fairwork said a missing point means that its researchers did not find enough evidence to verify a threshold, not necessarily that the platform violated it. The report also documented changes by Remotasks, including base pay for task-loading time, secondary assignments, advance notice of contract changes, and an appeal channel for account deactivation. Scale disputed the score as overly subjective while acknowledging some of the changes.[19]

Several workers brought wage-and-hour claims against Scale in 2024 and 2025, including allegations that contributors were misclassified as independent contractors and were not paid for all working time. Scale denied the allegations and said its practices complied with applicable law.[20] The United States Department of Labor separately investigated Scale's compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act; Reuters reported in May 2025, citing a person familiar with the matter, that the department had closed the investigation. Scale said it was "pleased with the update."[21]

As of September 2026, the Superior Court of California for the County of San Francisco had preliminarily approved a proposed settlement in McKinney et al. v. Scale AI, Inc., et al. (Case No. CGC24620481), brought by former independent contractors who worked with Scale AI or Smart Ecosystem and by HireArt employees. Under the proposed terms, the defendants, who include Scale AI, Smart Ecosystem, HireArt, and several individuals, would pay a gross settlement amount of $12.5 million. The court had not granted final approval, and a final approval hearing was scheduled for October 30, 2026. The defendants denied violating wage laws and denied that contributors were employees rather than independent contractors.[22][41] Preliminary settlement approval is not a judicial finding that the allegations were proven.

See also

References

  1. ^1 ^2Scale is an API for human labor - Y Combinator, July 26, 2016.
  2. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Scale AI's Series D: Expanding our Team to Empower AI Dreamers - Scale AI, December 1, 2020.
  3. ^1 ^2Scale AI acquires SiaSearch to give companies the same data engine superpowers that Tesla has - TechCrunch, November 3, 2021.
  4. ^Scale's Series F: Expanding the Data Foundry for AI - Scale AI, May 21, 2024.
  5. ^1 ^2Scale AI Acquires ICG Solutions to Accelerate National Security AI - Scale AI, April 20, 2026.
  6. ^1 ^2 ^3Introducing Scale Labs - Scale AI, March 9, 2026.
  7. ^A benchmark of expert-level academic questions to assess AI capabilities - *Nature*, published online January 28, 2026.
  8. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8Scale AI Announces Next Phase of Company's Evolution - Scale AI, June 12, 2025.
  9. ^1 ^2 ^3Meta Platforms, Inc., Quarterly Report for the quarter ended June 30, 2025 - U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
  10. ^1 ^2 ^3Meta invests $14.3B in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for 'superintelligence' team - Associated Press, June 13, 2025.
  11. ^What Meta's Investment Means for Our Customers, Partners, and Contributors - Scale AI, June 18, 2025.
  12. ^Google, Scale AI's largest customer, plans split after Meta deal, sources say - Reuters, June 13, 2025.
  13. ^1 ^2Scale AI lays off 14% of staff, largely in data-labeling business - TechCrunch, July 16, 2025.
  14. ^1 ^2Contracts for September 29, 2020 - U.S. Department of Defense, September 29, 2020.
  15. ^1 ^2 ^3DIU's Thunderforge Project to Integrate Commercial AI-Powered Decision-Making for Operational and Theater-Level Planning - Defense Innovation Unit, March 5, 2025.
  16. ^1 ^2 ^3Exclusive: Scale AI strikes deal with Pentagon - Axios, September 17, 2025.
  17. ^1 ^2DOD grows Scale AI agreement to $500M - Washington Technology, May 7, 2026.
  18. ^Behind the AI boom, an army of overseas workers in 'digital sweatshops' - *The Washington Post*, August 28, 2023.
  19. ^Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings 2025 - Fairwork, University of Oxford and WZB Berlin Social Science Center, May 2025.
  20. ^Scale AI hit by its second employee wage lawsuit in less than a month - TechCrunch, January 9, 2025.
  21. ^US Department of Labor drops investigation into Scale AI - Reuters, May 9, 2025.
  22. ^McKinney, et al. v. Scale AI, Inc., et al. settlement website - Court-authorized settlement administrator, 2026.
  23. ^NVIDIA Launches Open Agent Safety Platform to Secure Agents From Testing to Deployment - NVIDIA Newsroom press release, September 28, 2026.
  24. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8Scale AI Appoints Francis deSouza as CEO to Lead Next Phase of Company's Growth - Scale AI, July 30, 2026.
  25. ^1 ^2 ^3Scale AI taps former Google Cloud executive as new CEO - Axios, July 30, 2026 (corrected).
  26. ^A Message from Scale's Interim CEO, Jason Droege - Scale AI, June 18, 2025.
  27. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Scale's Next Era: Building for 2026 - Scale AI (Jason Droege), January 22, 2026.
  28. ^Ten Years of Scale - Scale AI (Jason Droege), May 14, 2026.
  29. ^1 ^2Scale AI's Alexandr Wang confirms departure for Meta as part of $14.3 billion deal - CNBC, June 12, 2025.
  30. ^OpenAI is winding down its work with Scale AI, whose founder is joining Meta - CNBC, June 18, 2025.
  31. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Scale AI's life after Meta deal has been rocky, but CFO insists it's not a 'zombie company' - CNBC, November 4, 2025.
  32. ^1 ^2Scale AI and Department of Defense Expand Partnership to Advance Army R&D - Scale AI, August 25, 2025.
  33. ^Scale AI Signs MOU with DOE to Advance the Genesis Mission - Scale AI, May 1, 2026.
  34. ^From Partnership to Execution: Scale AI Joins the Genesis Mission Consortium - Scale AI, July 16, 2026.
  35. ^Scale AI Sues Rival Startup Mercor, Alleging Trade Secret Theft - Bloomberg, via Claims Journal, September 4, 2025.
  36. ^Scale AI, Inc. v. Mercor.io Corporation et al, 3:2025cv07402 - U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California docket, via Justia.
  37. ^1 ^2Scale GenAI Portfolio - Scale AI, accessed September 28, 2026.
  38. ^Alexandr Wang, Chief AI Officer - Meta, accessed September 28, 2026.
  39. ^Illumina announces CEO transition plan as Francis deSouza resigns - CNBC, June 11, 2023.
  40. ^Scale AI: Data-centric infrastructure to accelerate the development of AI - Y Combinator company directory.
  41. ^McKinney, et al. v. Scale AI, Inc., et al.: FAQs - Court-authorized settlement administrator, 2026.
  42. ^To Steer the AI Frontier, Washington Must Build Its Testing Power - Scale AI (Francis deSouza), September 25, 2026.
  43. ^Paramount Appoints Dennis K. Cinelli as Chief Financial Officer and Adds Andrew Campion to Its Board of Directors - Paramount Skydance, January 14, 2026.

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