Amazon and Meta Invest $1 Billion in Scale AI, Valuing Company at $14 Billion

Tuesday, artificial intelligence startup Scale AI said it had raised $1 billion in a Series F funding round. This puts the value of the enterprise tech company at $13.8 billion, which is almost twice as much as what it was worth before. The 12th-ranked company on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list has raised $1.6 billion so far.

Cisco Investments, Amazon, ServiceNow Ventures, WCM , DFJ Growth , AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Elad Gil (co-founder of Colour Genomics and serial tech investor), and Meta are all new investors in the company. Accel is leading the latest round of funding. The round also included investors from the past, such as Coatue, Nvidia, Index Ventures, , Y Combinator, Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, Founders Fund , Tiger Global Management, Greenoaks, Nat Friedman and Wellington Management.

Giant language models and generative AI are both growing quickly thanks to scale AI. The data, like text, images, videos, and voice recordings, needs to be correctly labelled before AI technology can understand it and use it effectively. From labelling data used to train models that powered self-driving cars, Scale AI has grown to now helping to improve and fine tune the underlying data for almost any organisation that wants to use AI, which powers some of the most advanced models in use.

CEO’s Vision and Government Contracts

In a statement announcing the news, founder and CEO Alexandr Wang said, “Our calling is to build the data foundry for AI. With today’s funding, we’re moving into the next phase of that journey—accelerating the abundance of frontier data that will pave our road to AGI.” Scale AI also works with the government more and more.

The company was given a contract by the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office in August. The company said that the contract would help the DoD’s efforts to improve AI capabilities across the entire military, including projects in the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard.

Scale AI released Donovan in May. It is the first linear learning model (LLM) to be used on a classified U.S. government network. Wang talked about how Scale AI is helping the U.S. and its allies at the AI Insight Forum in Washington, D.C., in December. “The race for global leadership in AI is well underway,” he said. The future of warfare will depend on how well our country can adopt and use AI.