# Scale AI

> Scale AI is a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo. It provides the data engine, evaluation tools, and AI deployment platforms that power the world's leading AI labs, Fortune 500 enterprises, and US government agencies. By combining a massive distributed workforce with proprietary tooling, Scale accelerates AI development through high-quality data labeling, RLHF, model evaluation, and agentic platforms — making it one of the most consequential picks-and-shovels companies in the modern AI boom, with a $29B valuation as of mid-2025.

- **Founded:** 2016
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founders:** Alexandr Wang (CEO (2016–2025), Founder), Lucy Guo (Co-founder)
- **Team size:** ~1,200 full-time employees; 240,000+ gig/contract workers globally via Remotasks and Outlier
- **Products:** Scale Data Engine, Scale GenAI Platform, Scale Donovan, SEAL (Safety, Evaluations and Alignment Lab), Scale Labs
- **Notable:** Reached unicorn status ($1B+ valuation) in 2019 at Series C, Alexandr Wang became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at age 24 in 2021, Designated OpenAI's 'Preferred Partner' for fine-tuning in August 2023

## Products & services

- **Scale Data Engine** — Dataset curation, labeling, and synthesis platform powering supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and RLHF to align AI models to task-specific goals.
- **Scale GenAI Platform** — Full-stack generative AI tooling for enterprises covering data preparation, prompt orchestration, evaluation, and safety checks.
- **Scale Donovan** — Agentic AI platform for mission-critical operational workflows and decision support, primarily targeting government and defense customers.
- **SEAL (Safety, Evaluations and Alignment Lab)** — Research lab hosting expert-driven leaderboards and benchmarks for evaluating frontier AI models, including the 'Humanity's Last Exam' benchmark. Founded 2023.
- **Scale Labs** — Expanded research division launched March 2026 covering model capabilities, post-training evaluation, enterprise deployment, and risk oversight.
- **Remotasks** — Crowdworking subsidiary (est. 2017) with 240,000+ gig workers handling computer vision and autonomous vehicle data labeling globally.
- **Outlier** — Platform and subsidiary for LLM data annotation and generative AI fine-tuning tasks.
- **FORTRESS** — Red teaming and adversarial evaluation program for AI models.

## Achievements

- Reached unicorn status ($1B+ valuation) in 2019 at Series C
- Alexandr Wang became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at age 24 in 2021
- Designated OpenAI's 'Preferred Partner' for fine-tuning in August 2023
- Named to TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2025
- Secured $250M US federal AI contract in January 2022 — one of the largest federal AI contracts at the time
- Reached $29B valuation following Meta's $14.3B investment in June 2025
- Co-created 'Humanity's Last Exam', the hardest publicly available AI benchmark, with 2,500+ expert questions from 500+ institutions
- Built one of the world's largest distributed human-AI workforce networks with 240,000+ gig workers
- Revenue doubled YoY from ~$760M ARR (2023) to ~$1.5B ARR (2024)
- Landed Thunderforge DoD deal (2025) — AI for military logistics and asset movement planning
- Incubated Y Combinator's W16 batch, now one of the most valuable YC alumni companies

## Latest updates

- **2026-03** — Launched Scale Labs, an expanded research division building on SEAL, covering model capabilities, post-training evaluation, enterprise deployment, and risk oversight.
- **2025-06** — Meta invested $14.3B for a 49% non-voting stake, valuing Scale AI at $29B. Alexandr Wang departed as CEO to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs. Jason Droege (former Uber Eats builder) named new CEO.
- **2025-06** — OpenAI, Google, and xAI cut ties as customers following concerns about data-sharing with Meta-controlled vendor.
- **2025-03** — Announced Thunderforge, a multimillion-dollar DoD deal to develop AI agents for planning and executing military asset movements.
- **2025-02** — Signed a five-year AI partnership with the Government of Qatar to improve public services and training.
- **2025-01** — Co-released 'Humanity's Last Exam' benchmark with Center for AI Safety — 2,500 expert-level questions across 50 countries, frontier models score under 10%.
- **2024-05** — Closed $1B Series F round at $14B valuation, with Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Accel and others participating.
- **2024-02** — Selected by US DoD/CDAO to test and evaluate LLMs for military applications.

## Links

- Website: https://scale.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/scaleai
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/scale_ai
- GitHub: https://github.com/scaleapi
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scaleapi

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/scale-ai
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-01