On May 21, 2024, the San Francisco-based data labeling startupScale AIannounced it had raised $1 billion in Series F funding, doubling its valuation to $13.8 billion. The round was led by Accel, with participation from well-known institutional and corporate investors including Amazon, Meta, Cisco, Intel, AMD, ServiceNow, DFJ Growth, WCM, Elad Gil, Nvidia, Coatue, Y Combinator (YC), Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Tiger Global Management, Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, Greenoaks, Wellington Management, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
The company said it will use the new funds raised to accelerate "the richness of frontier data to pave the path to Artificial General Intelligence."
Scale AI was founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and focuses on providing data labeling services to companies that want to train machine learning models. Scale AI combines machine learning and human oversight to manage and annotate large amounts of data, which is crucial for training AI systems across industries, such as self-driving cars. The company's customers include Microsoft, Toyota, General Motors, Meta, the U.S. Department of Defense, and, since last August, ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Scale AI provides data that is correctly labeled and ready for training models, and offers specialized services for different industries; for example, self-driving car companies may need labeled data from cameras and lidar, while natural language processing (NLP) use cases require labeled text.
(Source:TechCrunch）