Scale AI

pre-labeling with rigorous human review processes. The company's growth accelerated further during 2020 and 2021 amid the broader surge in AI development. In December 2020, Scale raised 155 million dollars in a Series D round at a valuation of 3.5 billion dollars. The following year, the company secured a 325-million-dollar Series E at a valuation of approximately seven billion dollars, a mileston

rcial sector have included Google , Microsoft , Meta , General Motors , OpenAI , and Time . [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ] [ 12 ] The company also directly works with world governments, including the United States on military-related projects, [ 13 ] and with Qatar to improve the efficiency of its social programs. [ 14 ] In June 2025, Meta Platforms spent more than $14 billion to acquire a 49% non-voting sta

ure to 200 million dollars in 2025. The United States Department of Defense has become an increasingly important customer for Scale. In 2023, the Defense Innovation Unit awarded Scale a prime contract for Thunderforge, the Pentagon's flagship program for leveraging AI in military planning and operations. The company's Donovan platform was deployed on classified networks for the Army's XVIII Airbor

est for AI systems. [ 6 ] The company has assisted in the development of the benchmarks EnigmaEval, MultiChallenge, and MASK. [ 42 ] In February 2025, Scale AI agreed to a five-year partnership with the Qatari government to improve government services via AI-based tools and training, including predictive analytics , automation , and advanced data analytics . [ 14 ] The deal was signed at the Web Q

fety, Evaluation, and Alignment Lab (SEAL), founded in 2023. Scale Labs serves as a hub for research on AI model capabilities, post-training evaluation methods, enterprise deployment, and risk-oversight infrastructure. The division focuses on understanding and testing the reliability of advanced, agentic, and multimodal AI systems in real-world environments, developing public benchmarks and evalua

core team of approximately six thousand full-time employees. The company's client base has included leading AI laboratories and technology firms such as OpenAI , Anthropic , DeepMind , and xAI , as well as the United States Department of Defense. In June 2025, Meta Platforms acquired a forty-nine percent non-voting stake in Scale AI for 14.3 billion dollars, valuing the company at approximately 2

3 ] [ 45 ] The company will remain as a standalone, independent entity from Meta. [ 46 ] Former CEO Alexandr Wang took a top position inside Meta as a part of the deal [ 3 ] and was replaced by the company's chief strategy officer and former Uber executive, Jason Droege. [ 15 ] Scale Labs [ edit ] In March 2026, the company launched Scale Labs, an expanded research division that builds upon its Sa

operating boundary beyond a labor-only service, with the task schema and workflow defining how data is prepared and returned. A development team can submit the relevant task through the documented interface and connect the returned annotations with its dataset pipeline. Other current platform material describes annotation queues and the organization of reviewer activity. This is useful where an on

ACOM and EUCOM . [ 13 ] In April 2025, Scale AI released Scale Evaluation, a platform for testing LLMs against benchmarks to pinpoint weaknesses and flag where additional training data would improve the model. [ 42 ] Additional investment from Meta (2025) [ edit ] On June 10, 2025, it was reported that Meta Platforms had agreed to purchase a 49% stake (non-voting) in Scale AI for $14.8 billion. [

9 billion dollars and making it one of the largest private-market AI transactions in history. Following the deal, founder Alexandr Wang departed to join Meta as its Chief AI Officer, leading the META Superintelligence Lab , while former Chief Strategy Officer Jason Droege assumed the role of interim Chief Executive Officer. History The origins of Scale AI trace back to the realization by Alexandr

50 million contract to give American federal agencies access to its suite of tools. [ 25 ] In February 2022, Scale AI developed its Automated Damage Identification Service in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine . Satellite imagery was analyzed to measure the damage to buildings, which were then geotagged and reported to humanitarian groups. [ 26 ] In November 2022, Scale AI was recognized

ative AI annotation work and recruits contributors with specialized domain expertise, advanced degrees, and native fluency in various languages. In 2024, Scale consolidated its contractor-facing operations under the Outlier brand to provide a unified experience for its global workforce of more than 240,000 annotators. In May 2023, Scale launched two enterprise platforms that represented a signific

ically include professionals with advanced degrees, industry expertise, and native fluency in various languages. [ 50 ] Outlier tasks involve content evaluation and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). [ 51 ] References [ edit ] ↑ "Scale AI Appoints Francis deSouza as CEO to Lead Next Phase of Company's Growth" . Scale AI. July 30, 2026 . Retrieved August 30, 2026 . ↑ Vinn, Milana; H

ne Corps, making it the first commercial AI system of its kind to operate in a classified military environment. In September 2025, the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office entered into a 100-million-dollar Production Other Transaction Authority agreement with Scale. This partnership expanded dramatically in May 2026, when Scale was awarded a 500-million-dollar contract to su

k. Donovan assembles relevant operations and intelligence data to support battlefield decisions, intelligence analysis, and military planning. The Scale Enterprise Generative AI Platform serves commercial clients, providing tools to build, deploy, and manage AI applications using proprietary data without sending sensitive information to third-party providers. Early enterprise customers included Fo

atar 2025 Summit by Mohammed bin Ali bin Mohammed Al Mannai , the Qatari Minister of Communications and Information Technology . [ 43 ] Also in February, the company became a third-party evaluator of AI models for the U.S. AI Safety Institute. [ 5 ] In March 2025, Scale AI reached a multimillion-dollar deal with the United States Department of Defense to develop the Thunderforge project, a "major

s. [ 18 ] [ 48 ] In early 2024, the platform terminated operations in several countries, including Kenya, Nigeria, and Pakistan, citing administrative and operational considerations. [ 49 ] Outlier [ edit ] Outlier is a separate contributor platform operated by Scale AI, designed for generative AI data work, particularly in the development and fine-tuning of LLMs. [ 8 ] Contributors on Outlier typ

ant strategic expansion beyond data services. Donovan is a decision-support platform designed for government and defense customers, built on a large language model architecture deployed on secure classified networks. Scale signed a deal with the United States Army's XVIII Airborne Corps that made Donovan the first commercially developed large language model deployed on a classified military networ

ke in Scale AI. CEO Alexandr Wang left Scale AI to join Meta and was replaced by Jason Droege. [ 15 ] History [ edit ] Early years (2016–2019) [ edit ] Scale was founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo through Y Combinator . [ 16 ] The pair had worked together at Quora . [ 17 ] Initial investors of Scale included Dragoneer Investment Group , Tiger Global Management and Index Ventures . [ 18

tion frameworks such as SWE-Atlas and Voice Showdown. [ 47 ] [ independent source needed ] Remotasks [ edit ] In 2017, Scale AI established Remotasks, a crowdworking platform to support the creation of labeled data for machine learning, particularly in areas such as computer vision and autonomous vehicles . [ 18 ] [ 48 ] [ 7 ] The subsidiary has facilities in Southeast Asia and Africa. [ 18 ] [ 48

by Time on it’s Best Inventions of 2022 list. [ 27 ] The company also opened an office in St. Louis in that same year. [ 18 ] In January 2023, Scale laid off 20% of its workforce. [ 28 ] In May 2023, Scale AI signed a deal with the US Army ’s XVIII Airborne Corps , becoming the first AI company to deploy its LLM (known as Donovan) on a classified network. [ 17 ] In August 2023, Scale AI became Ope

ation across supported tasks. Current API documentation identifies image annotation, video annotation, LiDAR segmentation and document transcription among the task types. This supplies a concrete technical operating boundary beyond a labor-only service, with the task schema and workflow defining how data is prepared and returned. A development team can submit the relevant task through the document

step in U.S. military automation". [ 44 ] The project aims to use AI to “plan and help execute movements of ships, planes, and other assets”, with the goal of speeding up military decisions in both peace and wartime. The contract was awarded to Scale AI and other companies (such as Anduril Industries and Microsoft ) by the Defense Innovation Unit , and is intended to first be used with the USINDOP

Scale AI | Wiki — Firm — The Economy Skip to main content Home Scale AI Institutional profile Scale AI Scale Data Engine provides platform-backed data annotation across supported tasks. Current API documentation identifies image annotation, video annotation, LiDAR segmentation and document transcription among the task types. Technology Overview Scale Data Engine provides platform-backed data annot

venue driver, overtaking the company's original computer vision labeling work. Scale operates two primary contractor-facing platforms for its annotation workforce. Remotasks, established in 2017, originally handled computer vision and autonomous vehicle data labeling through facilities in the Philippines, Kenya, and other emerging markets. Outlier, launched as a separate platform, focuses on gener

Series B in August 2018, raising 18 million dollars to broaden its annotation capabilities beyond autonomous driving into areas such as mapping, geospatial analytics, and general-purpose image classification . The pivotal moment in Scale's early growth came in August 2019, when Peter Thiel's Founders Fund led a 100-million-dollar Series C round that pushed the company's valuation past one billion

Platforms]] (49%)<ref name=metadeal/>"},"subsidiaries":{"wt":"Remotasks<br/>Outlier"},"website":{"wt":"{{URL|https://scale.com}}"}},"i":0}}]}'> Scale AI, Inc. Type Private Industry Information technology Founded 2016 ; 10 years ago ( 2016 ) Founders Alexandr Wang Lucy Guo Headquarters San Francisco, California , United States Key people Francis deSouza (CEO) [ 1 ] Revenue $870 million (2024) [ 2 ]

r LLMs. [ 8 ] Scale AI operates an LLM Red Team that conducts human adversarial testing to identify vulnerabilities , biases , and safety risks in AI models. The team has worked with OpenAI , Google DeepMind and national AI Safety Institutes to evaluate systems against complex threats, including cybersecurity vulnerabilities, jailbreaks , and agentic AI behaviors. Scale AI's customers in the comme

going data program needs both a delivery operation and technical integration with the systems producing and consuming training data. Provider / operator: Scale AI Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States Provider origins / establishment: 2016 Rankings and recognition — 2027 Recorded appearances in The Economy Rankings . Each entry concerns the assessed business, product, institution

x Corporation and Koch Industries. In 2023, Scale also established the Safety, Evaluation, and Alignment Lab, known as SEAL, a research division focused on building evaluation frameworks for large language models. Under the leadership of Summer Yue, formerly the reinforcement learning from human feedback research lead for Bard at DeepMind , SEAL developed comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, red t

Owners Meta Platforms (49%) [ 3 ] Number of employees 1,200 (2025) [ 4 ] Subsidiaries Remotasks Outlier Website scale .com Scale AI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence infrastructure and software company based in San Francisco , California . Originally focused on data annotation , the company also offers RLHF services, large language model (LLM) evaluation, and enterprise software suites

or workforce scope in the linked edition. Ranking Edition / classification Assessed scope Data Annotation & Labeling Platforms 2027 · Tier I · position 4 Scale AI Further reference Technology rankings The Economy Review Corrections and Updates Factual corrections, updated institutional information, and supporting references may be submitted through The Economy Portal . All proposed changes are sub

model developers and autonomous vehicle companies to government agencies and enterprise organizations, though the composition of that base has shifted significantly following Meta's 2025 investment. In the autonomous driving sector, Scale established itself early as a critical infrastructure provider. Companies developing self-driving vehicles require enormous volumes of precisely labeled sensor

by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo, the company provides data labeling , reinforcement learning from human feedback services, model evaluation, and enterprise AI platforms that underpin the development of many of the world's most prominent AI systems. Scale AI operates through a global workforce of over 240,000 contract annotators, managed via its subsidiary platforms Remotasks and Outlier, alongside a

Scale AI - Learn AI Jump to content Learn AI Search Log in Personal tools Log in Scale AI From Learn AI Learn AI Companies Platforms and data Scale AI Scale AI Company Founded in 2016 Headquarters San Francisco Type Subsidiary Industry Artificial intelligence Scale AI is an American artificial intelligence infrastructure and data company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2016

s 2027 — Scale Data Engine . At a glance Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States Provider origins / establishment 2016 Contents Principal activities and assessed operations Rankings and recognition — 2027 Further reference Related Economy analysis Principal activities and assessed operations The category profiles below describe the named businesses, products, programmes or employee g

to build and deploy AI applications. The company’s research arm, the Safety, Evaluation and Alignment Lab, focuses on evaluating and aligning LLMs. [ 5 ] It also co-created the benchmark Humanity's Last Exam . [ 6 ] Scale AI outsources data labeling through its subsidiaries, Remotasks, which focuses on computer vision and autonomous vehicles, [ 7 ] and Outlier, which focuses on annotating data fo