Scale AI

Scale AI was founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo and is headquartered in San Francisco. The company began as a data-labelling business, supplying the annotated training data that machine-learning teams needed for computer vision and autonomous driving, and grew into a supplier of human-generated and human-verified data for frontier large language models. Its customer base has included the major AI laboratories as well as enterprises and governments.

The business now runs along two lines. The first is the data business: expert-labelled datasets, reinforcement learning from human feedback, model evaluation and the SEAL research programme, which published more than 450 evaluations across over 50 model releases in 2025. The second is applications: software built on top of frontier models for specific enterprise and government workflows, including the Scale GenAI Platform and Donovan, a decision-support product deployed on classified US government networks.

Government work has become a distinct pillar rather than a side business. Scale is the prime contractor on the Defense Innovation Unit's Thunderforge programme, which embeds AI agents in military planning workflows at US Indo-Pacific Command and US European Command alongside Anduril and Microsoft. In May 2026 the Department of War's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office raised the ceiling on its production Other Transaction Authority agreement with Scale from $100 million to $500 million, five times the value agreed in September 2025. Internationally, Scale has deployed applications for Qatar's Ministry of Education, Council of Ministers and Qatar Museums.

The company's ownership changed materially in June 2025, when Meta invested approximately $14.3 billion for a 49% non-voting stake at a valuation of more than $29 billion. Alexandr Wang left the chief executive role to join Meta's AI effort while remaining a director; Scale distributed the proceeds to shareholders and vested equity holders as liquidity, and chief strategy officer Jason Droege took over as interim chief executive. Scale has stated that it remains an independent company and that Meta holds only a minority stake in its outstanding equity.

Francis deSouza became chief executive on 10 August 2026, having been appointed by the board on 30 July. He was previously chief operating officer and president of security products at Google Cloud and, before that, president and chief executive of Illumina. For an investor, the questions that follow are the durability of the data-labelling business as laboratories build in-house pipelines, the pace at which the applications and public-sector businesses replace it, and the practical effect of a 49% shareholder that is also a customer and a competitor for AI talent.