AI data foundry company Scale AI announced it had closed a $1 billion financing transaction, bringing the company to a valuation of $13.8 billion. Existing investor Accel led the funding round with participation from returning investors, including Y Combinator, Nat Friedman, Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Coatue, Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, NVIDIA, Tiger Global Management, Greenoaks, and Wellington Management. The new investors include Cisco Investments, DFJ Growth, Intel Capital, ServiceNow Ventures, AMD Ventures, WCM, Amazon, Elad Gil, and Meta.
Scale has a track record of solving the data challenges of companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. This new funding round will also enable Scale to build upon its prior model evaluation work with enterprise customers, the U.S. Department of Defense and work on the White House-announced DEFCON 31 red-teaming event to deepen its capabilities and offerings for public and private evaluations.
With AI models evolving the quality, quantity, and complexity of frontier data, the data needed to drive and ensure performance increases exponentially. Scale powers the data behind the end-to-end AI lifecycle, ensuring model builders and enterprises have the data they need to deploy AI confidently.
J.P. Morgan and Allen & Co served as placement agents to Scale AI in connection with this transaction.
KEY QUOTES:
“Data abundance is not the default; it’s a choice. It requires bringing together the best minds in engineering, operations, and AI. Our vision is one of data abundance, where we have the means of production to continue scaling frontier LLMs many more orders of magnitude. We should not be data-constrained in getting to GPT-10.”
– Alexandr Wang, CEO and founder of Scale AI
“From day one, Scale has been laser-focused on unlocking the potential of data for AI. All of the major advancements in the industry we have today wouldn’t have been possible without Scale’s data engine at the center. Their vision is why we first partnered with Scale in the earliest days and why we continue to believe that their expertise remains paramount in addressing the industry’s growing needs for high-quality data as the AI industry continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”
– Dan Levine, partner at Accel
