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Scale AIData foundry for AI: labeling, RLHF, and defense AI infrastructure; partially absorbed into Meta in 2025
Valuation (Jun 2025 Meta deal)
$29B implied
Meta paid $14.3B for 49% non-voting stake
Meta Strategic Investment
$14.3B
Largest single private-AI strategic stake in history at announce
Annualized Revenue (2024)
~$870M
Per The Information; growing toward $1B+ run-rate in 2025
DoD Thunderforge Award
$250M
CDAO prime contract Mar 2025 for joint-warfighter agentic AI
Total raised: ~$1.6B equity (+ $14.3B Meta strategic stake) · Latest valuation: $29B implied (Meta Jun 2025 deal)
| Round | Date | Amount | Valuation | Key Investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2016 | $4.5M | - | AccelIndex |
| Series A | 2017 | $18M | - | Index (lead) |
| Series B | 2018 | $18M | - | Founders Fund (lead) |
| Series C | Aug 2019 | $100M | $1B | Founders Fund (lead) |
| Series D | Dec 2020 | $155M | $3.5B | Tiger Global (lead)WellingtonGreenoaks |
| Series E | Apr 2021 | $325M | $7.3B | Dragoneer (lead)GreenoaksTiger GlobalWellington |
| Series F | May 2024 | $1B | $13.8B | Accel (lead)CiscoIntel CapitalAMD+4 more |
| Meta Strategic | Jun 2025 | $14.3B (49% non-voting stake) | $29B (implied) | Meta Platforms |
| Product | Type | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Scale Data Engine | Human + model labeling for vision / text / RLHF | GA |
| Scale GenAI Platform | Fine-tuning, eval, alignment for enterprise customers | GA |
| Scale Donovan | Defense / national-security AI agent platform | GA (JWCC and DoD-accredited) |
| SEAL Leaderboard | Public LLM benchmark on Scale-curated tasks | GA |
| Scale Studio | Synthetic data + simulation for autonomy and robotics | GA |
| Outlier | RLHF / expert-feedback marketplace for skilled annotators | GA (rebrand of Remotasks) |
$14.3B Jun 2025 non-voting investment; Wang + senior team transferred to Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Thunderforge prime contract Mar 2025 ($250M); also delivers to Army, Air Force, USMC, INDOPACOM via Donovan.
Long-time RLHF and red-teaming partner for GPT-3 / 4 / 5 generations.
Labeling and evaluation services for the Phi family and Azure AI offerings.
Long-tenured autonomy customers; Scale was the de facto AV labeling vendor through the 2020s.
Series F investor; co-developer on synthetic data pipelines for Cosmos and AV stacks.
Series F investor; LLM labeling and eval for the MI300/MI400 training runs.
Alexandr Wang (MIT dropout) and Lucy Guo launch Scale at Y Combinator
Expansion beyond computer-vision labeling into NLP and document processing
$1B valuation at Series C; Scale becomes the canonical labeling vendor for autonomy and DoD
Generative AI platform purpose-built for defense and national-security customers
$1B raise with strategic check-ins from Meta, NVIDIA, AMD, Cisco, Intel; ARR ~$750M
$250M CDAO contract for agentic AI joint-warfighter prototypes (Scale prime contractor)
Meta pays $14.3B for 49% non-voting stake; Alexandr Wang departs to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs
Former Uber Eats founder takes over as interim CEO post Wang departure
~14% of headcount cut as Meta consolidates labeling onto its own platform; consumer-data labeling product wound down
Largest AI data-labeling and human-in-the-loop platform. Customers include OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, the US Department of Defense (Donovan). Meta acquired roughly 49% of Scale in 2025 in a reported $14.3B-equivalent transaction that also brought Alex Wang into Meta's superintelligence org. Remaining business operates as a standalone with new leadership. Scale AI was founded in 2016, is headquartered in San Francisco, CA and employs ~900.
Scale AI has raised ~$1.6B equity (+ $14.3B Meta strategic stake) in total at a $29B implied (Meta Jun 2025 deal) valuation, based on the funding rounds Sterling tracks.
Sterling groups Scale AI in the AI Software sector, alongside OpenAI (private), Anthropic (private), SpaceXAI (private), Mistral AI (private), DeepSeek (private) and Cohere (private).
If you are researching Scale AI, also look at Alibaba (Qwen), Tencent (Hunyuan) and Baidu (Ernie). You can compare all of them side by side or browse the full AI Software sector on Sterling.
