Founder: Alexandr Wang (CEO)
Launched: 2016
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding: $1.6 billion
Valuation: $14 billion (PitchBook)
Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, deep neural networks/deep learning, edge computing, explainable AI, generative AI, machine learning
Industry:Â Enterprise technology
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 2 (No. 12 in 2024)
A leading provider of data infrastructure for artificial intelligence, Scale AI is built to take advantage of a gap in the machine learning pipeline it identified — the need for high-quality labeled data to help streamline and fuel AI development.Â
The company's early traction came from clients in industries racing to adopt AI — autonomous vehicles, robotics, AR/VR, and mapping — but it has expanded to other industries. Its offerings are comprehensive tools that integrate annotation, synthetic data generation, and model evaluation.
One of its biggest moves is branching into the defense industry, especially with a landmark deal last August with the Department of Defense's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. The partnership will improve the Department of Defense's efforts to advance AI capabilities for the U.S. military. The scope of projects will include the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Coast Guard.
Scale AI also announced a new multi-million dollar deal with the DoD in March to help with "Thunderforge," an initiative to develop AI agents for U.S. military planning and operations that also includes this year's No. 1 Disruptor Anduril. The program partners with technology companies to develop and deploy AI agents used for modeling and simulation, decision-making support, proposed courses of action and automated workflows. It is expected to be used with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and U.S. European Command teams, with further plans to expand to other groups.
In April, Scale inked a five-year agreement with Qatar to provide AI services for education, civil service, tourism, health care and transportation.
It became AWS' first model customization and evaluation partner in July 2024, which will help the company's clients modify and improve their generative AI models.Â
"Our calling is to build the data foundry for AI ... accelerating the abundance of frontier data that will pave our road to AGI," founder and CEO Alexandr Wang said in a blog post at the time of its latest fundraising. The May 2024 $1 billion series F gave the company a $14 billion valuation and included Cisco Investments, Amazon, and Meta as new investors in the company.
Shortly after the 2025 Disruptor 50 list was announced, Meta agreed to invest another $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI as Mark Zuckerberg presses for more AI success against big tech rivals, and tapped Wang to serve as a leader for a new "superintelligence" research lab Meta is creating — Wang remains on the board at Scale AI.
As the AI industry grows, more questions are being raised about how these systems are being trained and whether they can remain ethical and unbiased without human input, especially in military applications that by their nature are controversial. In September 2024, Scale partnered with the Center for AI Safety to help create "Humanity's Last Exam," a project aimed at creating an AI benchmark for the industry.
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