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Headquarters
San Francisco, CA
CEO
Alexandr Wang
Website
Home  >  Companies  >  Scale AI
Scale AI
Scale provides data labeling and management services to companies building AI/ML models.

Revenue

$760.00M

2023

Valuation

$7.30B

2022

Growth Rate (y/y)

162%

2023

Funding

$602.00M

2022

Revenue

None

In 2023, Scale’s revenue exploded to $760M ARR, up 162% YoY, as $18B in capital flowed into foundational model companies like OpenAI ($1.3B ARR in 2023), Anthropic ($200M ARR in 2023) and Cohere along with generative AI-based applications.

Business Model

Scale started in 2016 as a smarter, concierge-operated version of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to take on the data labeling work for companies building AI/ML models. As an AI model is only as good as the data used to train it, AI teams spend ~80% of their time on data sourcing, labeling, and preparation. AI models are trained on data labeled by humans to tell the difference between a cat, car, and truck before going live. Prior to Scale, the data labeling was farmed out to crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which was clunky and lacked quality control or conducted in-house by large teams, possible only for companies such as Meta and Google.

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Scale got its start by simplifying the data labeling workflow with an API to get high-volume raw data, software to pre-label the raw data, and human contractors to make final edits & quality checks. Scale’s launch coincided with the rapid rise of self-driving vehicle startups that needed enormous high-quality training data that the general-purpose vendors couldn’t provide. Scale focused on this narrow use case, becoming better at labeling complex data like LiDAR point clouds than its competitors, solving a fundamental hair-on-fire problem for self-driving car companies.

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Like AWS, Scale charges its customers on usage with two types of plans. One is pay-as-you-go with no minimum commitment and a self-serve platform, priced per data unit labeled. For instance, images are 2 ₵ per image and 6 ₵ per annotation. Its enterprise plan has annual volume commitments and volume discounts. As Scale’s contractors label more images/video per hour using improved pre-labeling AI models, a usage-based pricing model lets Scale expand its revenue better than hourly/seat-based models typically used by outsourcing firms. It also helps Scale close deals faster as customers can easily estimate how much it will cost them even before talking to the sales team. 

Unlike the AI software companies like C3 and Palantir, Scale is not a build-once-and-sell-everywhere company as it pays its contractors every time they label images. It typically employs independent contractors in the Philippines, Kenya, and Venezuela, whom it recruits through a separate portal, Remotasks.

Remotasks portal for recruiting independent contractors.

Product

Scale offers four types of products to its customers that run on top of its ML models, driven by the taskers platform used by independent contractors. 

Data labeling

This is Scale’s core product and comes in two variants. One is Rapid, where Scale provides the software and outsourced contractors as a bundle. The other is Studio, a DIY SaaS for customers who just want the pre-labeling software and hire their own human workforce.

Data management

Nucleus, introduced by Scale in 2020, is like Google Photos for training data. It comes with an ML-powered search engine that customers use to visually create data slices like daytime photos of trucks, identify incorrectly labeled data, and filter data through graphs of the model’s performance. Scale recently launched two new products, Validate to run tests on ML models and compare performance, and Launch to ship the ML models to production.

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Data Generation

None

Synthetic applies ML on the real-world raw data collected by Scale over the years to generate artificial datasets that its customers use to augment their training data.

Workflow automation

None

Customers can use Scale’s automation SaaS to extract data from documents or build metadata from images and texts.

Scale feeds the data from human labelers into its ML models, which are used across its product suite to make them faster and more accurate. The ML models also feed into the allocations algorithm in the taskers platform to pick the best set of contractors for a project. 

Screenshots from Scale Rapid

Comparison of raw data with labeled data.

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Competition

When Scale started, it got an edge over competitors by bundling pre-labeling software and outsourced independent contractors in an easy-to-use self-serve solution. At that time, Mechanical Turk and Appen (Valuation: $286M) had a larger army of independent contractors but didn’t have Scale’s software, and CloudFactory ($343M) and Sama used employees for data labeling, reducing their flexibility of scaling up or down quickly.

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However, over the years, competition caught up. Appen acquired Figure Eight, and TELUS International acquired Lionbridge AI and Playment to build ML-assisted pre-labeling features. At the same time, Sama and Cloud Factory rolled up third-party contractors into their projects. Many startups, such as Labelbox, Snorkel, and Heartex, started crowding the data-labeling market in the last few years. On the enterprise side, companies use data labeling from Amazon Sagemaker or Google’s AI Platform, where they may be already running their ML models, or consider outsourcing firms such as Accenture or Cognizant that are already managing their IT projects.

TAM Expansion

New products

With the launch of new products Launch and Validate, Scale wants to move up the AI value chain from a Mechanical Turk replacement to becoming Atlassian for AI software development with data management, model training and deployment, and performance monitoring. Scale wants to use the easy integration of its new products with Rapid and Nucleus as a wedge to get into the market. The global AI software market is expected to become 2x to reach ~$120B by 2025, large enough for multiple picks-and-shovels companies like Scale. While the market is large, it is dominated by platforms such as Datarobot, Dataiku, and Alteryx and cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. 

Growth of the AI software market.

Customer base expansion

The data labeling market is expected to grow from $5B in 2022 to $22B in 2027, much of it coming from a digital shift in sectors such as public sector enterprises, government departments, and legacy companies that have collected data for years—from purchase orders to website traffic, inventory levels and SKUs—without knowing what to do with it. Scale is present in almost all segments of the data labeling market, which gives it an advantage in expanding to more sectors beyond autonomous vehicle companies. For instance, Scale recently signed a $249M contract with the US Department of Defense and is opening a new office outside the Silicon Valley in St. Louis, Missouri, the innovation hub of the US Department of Defense. Another example is Scale’s deal with States Title, a real estate startup that applies AI to the title and escrow process for faster transactions. 

Growth of the data labeling market.

Geographic expansion 

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Team
Alexandr Wang
Founder and CEO
Malek A
Head of data science and analytics
Sarah Tierney Niyogi
General counsel
Richard Ni
Head of people
Marcel Santilli
Head of marketing
Dennis Cinelli
CFO

Disclaimers

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