Early years (2016–2019) Scale was founded in 2016 by
Alexandr Wang and
Lucy Guo through
Y Combinator. The pair had worked together at
Quora. Initial investors of Scale included
Dragoneer Investment Group,
Tiger Global Management and
Index Ventures. Guo was fired in 2018. In August 2019, after
Peter Thiel’s
Founders Fund made a $100 million investment in Scale, its valuation exceeded $1 billion and it acquired
unicorn status. In May 2021,
Michael Kratsios,
Chief Technology Officer of the United States under the
Trump administration, joined as Scale AI's managing director and head of strategy. By July 2021, Scale had reached a valuation of $7 billion, after a financing led by Greenoaks, Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global Management. There was an increased demand for data labelling from clients in different industries. In February 2022, Scale AI developed its Automated Damage Identification Service in response to the
Russian invasion of Ukraine. Satellite imagery was analyzed, measuring the damage to buildings, which were then geotagged and reported to humanitarian groups. In November 2022, Scale AI was recognized by
Time on it’s Best Inventions of 2022 list. The company also opened an office in St. Louis in that same year. In May 2023, Scale AI signed a deal with the
US Army’s
XVIII Airborne Corps, becoming the first AI company to deploy its LLM (known as Donovan) on a classified network. The company's services were used to create
ChatGPT. In December 2023, Scale AI was among a list of companies that contributed to Meta Platforms’s Purple Llama initiative, a security framework for the purpose of development of open generative AI models. In February 2024, Scale AI was selected by the Department of Defense to test and evaluate its LLMs for military purposes under a one-year contract. In March 2024, Scale reached a valuation of almost $13 billion after Accel led another round of funding. In May 2024, Scale raised an additional $1 billion with new investors including
Amazon and Meta Platforms. Its valuation reached $14 billion. In August 2024, Scale signed an agreement with the US
AI Safety Institute, collaborating with the agency on research, testing, and evaluation of the company’s AI models. The US AI Safety Institute is controlled by the
Department of Commerce’s
National Institute of Standards and Technology. In December 2024, Scale was sued by a former employee, alleging that the company was committing wage theft and misclassifying workers. The following month, a second employee filed a similar suit. In January 2025, several contractors sued Scale alleging psychological harm from being exposed to disturbing content. In January 2025, it was reported in
The Conversation that Scale AI and Meta had previously teamed up to create and sell Defense Llama, an LLM product with military-style defense purposes. The company also took out a full-page ad in
The Washington Post, appealing to American President
Donald Trump to "win the
AI war". Later in the month, Scale AI and the
Center for AI Safety partnered to release
Humanity's Last Exam, a benchmark test for AI systems. The company has also assisted in the development of the benchmarks EnigmaEval, MultiChallenge, and MASK. In February 2025, Scale AI agreed to a five-year partnership with the
Qatari government to improve government services via AI-based tools and training, including
predictive analytics,
automation, and advanced
data analytics. The deal was signed at the Web Qatar 2025 Summit by
Mohammed bin Ali bin Mohammed Al Mannai, the
Qatari Minister of Communications and Information Technology. Also in February, the company became a third-party evaluator of AI models for the U.S. AI Safety Institute. In March 2025, Scale AI reached a multimillion-dollar deal with the United States Department of Defense to develop the Thunderforge project, a "major step in U.S. military automation". The project aims to use AI to “plan and help execute movements of ships, planes, and other assets”, with the goal of speeding up military decisions in both peace and wartime. The contract was awarded to Scale AI and other companies (such as
Anduril Industries and
Microsoft) by the
Defense Innovation Unit, and is intended to first be used with the
USINDOPACOM and
EUCOM. In April 2025, Scale AI released Scale Evaluation, a platform used to test LLMs against benchmarks to pinpoint weaknesses and flag where additional training data would improve the model. The company will remain as a standalone, independent entity from Meta. Former CEO Alexandr Wang took a top position inside Meta as a part of the deal and was replaced by the company's chief strategy officer and former
Uber executive, Jason Droege.
Scale Labs (March 2026) In March 2026, the company launched Scale Labs, an expanded research division that builds upon its Safety, Evaluation, and Alignment Lab (SEAL) founded in 2023. Scale Labs serves as a hub for research into artificial intelligence model capabilities, post-training evaluation methods, enterprise deployment, and risk oversight infrastructure. The division focuses on understanding and testing the reliability of advanced, agentic, and multimodal AI systems in real-world environments, developing public benchmarks and evaluation frameworks such as SWE-Atlas and Voice Showdown. == Remotasks ==