Scale AI, an artificial intelligence startup, announced Tuesday that it has raised $1 billion in a Series F fundraising round, valuing the enterprise technology company at $13.8 billion, nearly double its previous stated valuation. The San Francisco-based company, ranked 12th on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has raised $1.6 billion to far.
Accel is leading the current investment round, which includes Cisco Investments, DFJ Growth, Intel Capital, ServiceNow Ventures, AMD Ventures, WCM, Amazon, Elad Gil (Color Genomics co-founder and serial innovation investor), and Meta, all of which are new investors in the company.
Existing investors such as Y Combinator, Nat Friedman, Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Coatue, Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, Nvidia, Tiger Global Management, Greenoaks, and Wellington Management took part in the round.
Scale AI is playing an important part in the emergence of generative artificial intelligence and big language models, as data — whether text, photos, video, or voice recordings — must be properly labeled before it can be digested and used efficiently by AI technology. Scale AI has progressed from categorizing data to training models for self-driving cars to now assisting with the improvement and fine tuning of the underlying data for practically any company wishing to deploy AI, powering some of the most advanced models now in use.
“Our calling is to build the data foundry for AI, and with today’s funding, we’re moving into the next phase of that journey – accelerating the abundance of frontier data that will pave the road to AGI,” founder and CEO Alexandr Wang said in a statement announcing the announcement.
Scale AI is increasingly collaborating with the public sector.
The company was awarded a contract by the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office in August, which the company said will help boost the DoD’s efforts to advance AI capabilities for the entire military, spanning projects in the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard.
Scale AI debuted Donovan, an AI-powered decision-making platform, in May, making it the first LLM to be installed on a secret US government network.
Wang spoke at the AI Insight Forum in Washington, D.C., in December about Scale AI’s role in supporting the United States and its allies.
“The race for AI global leadership is well underway, and our nation’s ability to efficiently adopt and implement AI will define the future of warfare,” he stated. “I am confident that the United States has the ability to lead the world in AI adoption to support US national security.” The world is not slowing down, and we must rise to the challenge.”
The company also hopes to play a role in AI development worldwide. It stated in May that it will establish a London office as its European headquarters and will seek to help and collaborate with the UK government on AI initiatives.
