Scale AI CEO stresses startup's independence after Meta deal

Time of India

7 hours ago

Scale AI
's new leader said the data-labeling startup remains independent from
Meta
Platforms Inc. despite the social media giant taking a 49% stake just weeks ago, and is focused on expanding its business.
Interim Chief Executive Officer
Jason Droege
said Meta, a customer since 2019, won't receive special treatment even after its $14.3 billion investment.
'There's no preferential access that they have
to anything,' Droege said Tuesday in an interview, one of his first since taking the interim CEO role in mid-June. 'They are a customer, and we will support them like we do our other customers, that's the extent of the relationship.'
Scale's 28-year-old former CEO and co-founder
Alexandr Wang
left the startup to lead a new superintelligence unit at Meta, part of the Facebook parent company's multibillion-dollar investment to catch up on AI development. Less than a dozen of Scale's roughly 1,500 employees left to join Wang at Meta, Droege said.
Wang will continue to hold a seat on the board, but Meta won't receive any other board representation, Droege said, adding that Scale's
customer data privacy
rules and governance remains the same. The board doesn't have access to internal customer-specific data, he added.
'We have elaborate procedures to ensure the privacy and security of our customers — their IP, their data — and that it doesn't make its way across our customer base,' Droege said.
Droege, who was promoted from his previous role as chief strategy officer, is a seasoned Silicon Valley tech executive. Prior to joining Scale, he was a partner at venture capital firm Benchmark, and before that was a vice president at Uber Technologies Inc., where he launched the company's Uber Eats product.
Now, he has the job of evolving Scale AI's business in an increasingly crowded corner of the AI market.
For years, Scale has been the best-known name in the market for helping tech firms label and annotate the data needed to build AI models; it generated about $870 million in revenue in 2024 and expects $2 billion in revenue this year, Bloomberg News reported in April.
Yet a growing number of companies, including Turing, Invisible Technologies, Labelbox and Uber, now offer various services to meet AI developers' bottomless need for data. And it's likely to only get trickier, as Scale AI rivals are now seeing a surge in interest from customers, some of whom may be worried about Meta getting added visibility into their AI development process.
And in light of the Meta investment and partnership with Scale, some of those customers are cutting ties with the company, including OpenAI and Google, as Bloomberg and others have reported.
While
data labeling
remains a large part of Scale's business, Droege said the startup is also expanding its application business that provides services on top of other AI foundation models. That app business is currently making nine figures in revenue, Droege said, without giving a specific number, and includes Fortune 500 companies in health care, education and telecommunications. Scale also counts the US government as one of its customers.
The CEO added that Scale will continue to work with many different kinds of
AI models
rather than focusing on Meta's Llama models exclusively.
As Meta battles other AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic for top talent, Droege said he's communicating to his employees that Scale is a business undergoing a significant change, and there's still an 'enormous opportunity' ahead as the AI industry continues to grow. He also pointed out Scale's ability to adapt, as over time the company has taken on different kinds of data-related work — from
autonomous vehicles
to generative AI — and worked with enterprise and government customers.
'This is an extremely agile company,' he said.