Scala has emerged from stealth, announcing its official launch alongside $8.5 million in funding, including a seed round co-led by Madrona and FUSE. The Bellevue, Washington-based company is positioning itself as an operational intelligence platform built specifically for modern contact centers, as these environments increasingly shift toward hybrid operations in which human agents work alongside AI.
The company is targeting a long-running pain point in customer experience operations: a proliferation of fragmented tools and dashboards that surface isolated, often one-off metrics, but fall short of diagnosing root causes across the full operation. Scala’s pitch is that legacy systems describe what is happening without helping leaders understand why it is happening or where to intervene, a gap that becomes more acute as AI-driven automation is layered across channels, workflows, and systems.
Scala says its platform is a unified operational intelligence layer that connects data across systems and channels, spanning both human and AI performance, to help customer experience leaders make more deliberate operational decisions tied to outcomes such as performance, cost, and customer results. Rather than offering a narrow automation tool or a single workflow add-on, the company is framing its product as a holistic layer that interprets how the overall operation behaves and translates insights into action.
The company was founded by Ardie Sameti, who serves as co-founder and CEO, and Rajeev Singh, who serves as co-founder and executive chair. Sameti previously led AI and platform initiatives at Accolade, where he worked closely with high-volume service operations supporting millions of member interactions. Singh is a veteran enterprise software operator and currently serves as CEO of Smartsheet. He also co-founded Concur Technologies, which was acquired by SAP for $8.3 billion, and later served as CEO of Accolade, where he helped scale the company to more than 14 million members and led it through an IPO.
Madrona and FUSE cited the founders’ operating experience in complex service organizations as central to their investment thesis, emphasizing the need for an intelligence layer to coordinate decision-making across increasingly intricate, AI-augmented customer-experience environments. Scala is headquartered in Bellevue and is marketing itself as purpose-built for customer experience operators seeking clarity across systems, channels, and the combined work of people and automation.
KEY QUOTES
“I’ve seen firsthand how complex and mission-critical contact centers have become, but leaders are still expected to manage them with fragmented tools and static dashboards. Scala gives operators a clear, connected understanding of what’s actually happening so action can be focused, timely, and effective.”
Ardie Sameti, Co-Founder And CEO, Scala
“As humans and AI increasingly work side by side, organizations need an intelligence layer that helps leaders understand what’s happening across complex systems, and act with intention. The most successful founders start from a position of deep domain expertise and a vision for how technology can unlock an organization’s impact. We’ve seen these qualities in Ardie and Raj over many years, and it’s exactly what Scala is bringing to market for CX teams.”
Matt McIlwain, Managing Director, Madrona
“In the years we’ve known Ardie and Raj, what’s consistently stood out is the depth of their operating experience and how deliberately they build. They’ve spent years inside complex service organizations, and that perspective shows up clearly in how Scala is being built – a holistic service solution spanning all aspects of the CX journey. We have absolute conviction that this team will be something special.”
Kellan Carter, General Partner, FUSE
