Scale AI Secures $1 Billion Series F Round with Backing from Amazon and Meta

Scale AI Secures $1 Billion Series F Round with Backing from Amazon and Meta
Image credit: LinkedIn 

Scale AI, a data-labeling service provider for training machine learning models, has raised $1 billion in a Series F round. The funding includes both primary and secondary investments and features notable contributors such as Amazon and Meta. This fundraising marks another significant venture capital investment in the booming AI sector, following Amazon's $4 billion investment in Anthropic and ongoing billion-dollar rounds for companies like Mistral AI and Perplexity.

Founded in 2016, Scale AI blends machine learning with "human-in-the-loop" oversight to manage and annotate large datasets, crucial for training AI systems across various industries, including autonomous vehicles. Despite laying off 20% of its staff last year, the company's valuation has surged to $13.8 billion, up from $7 billion in 2021 when it raised $325 million in a Series E round.

The Series F round was led by Accel, which also led Scale AI’s Series A and participated in subsequent funding rounds. The round attracted new investors such as the venture arms of Cisco, Intel, AMD, and ServiceNow, along with DFJ Growth, WCM, and Elad Gil. Existing investors, including Nvidia, Coatue, Y Combinator, Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Tiger Global Management, Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, Greenoaks, Wellington Management, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, also participated.

Data management and processing have become increasingly critical in the AI landscape. Scale AI’s role in annotating and preparing unstructured data for AI training makes it an essential player in the industry. Companies like Microsoft, Toyota, GM, Meta, the U.S. Department of Defense, and OpenAI, which uses Scale AI to fine-tune its GPT-3.5 models, are among its clients.

Scale AI plans to use the new funds to accelerate the creation of abundant data, which is vital for advancing towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). CEO and co-founder Alexandr Wang emphasized the importance of data abundance, stating that it requires a collaborative effort from the best minds in engineering, operations, and AI. He envisions a future where the production capacity for data supports scaling frontier large language models (LLMs) to many more orders of magnitude, ensuring that data constraints do not hinder progress towards developing advanced AI models like GPT-10.