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Scale AI鈥檚 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鈥檛 receive special treatment even after its $14.3 billion investment.鈥淭here鈥檚 no preferential access that they have to anything,鈥 Droege said Tuesday in an interview, one of his first since taking the interim CEO role in mid-June. 鈥淭hey are a customer, and we will support them like we do our other customers, that鈥檚 the extent of the relationship.鈥漇cale鈥檚 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鈥檚 multibillion-dollar investment to catch up on AI development. Less than a dozen of Scale鈥檚 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鈥檛 receive any other board representation, Droege said, adding that Scale鈥檚 customer data privacy rules and governance remains the same. The board doesn鈥檛 have access to internal customer-specific data, he added.鈥淲e have elaborate procedures to ensure the privacy and security of our customers 鈥 their IP, their data 鈥 and that it doesn鈥檛 make its way across our customer base,鈥 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鈥檚 Uber Eats product.Bloomberg
Now, he has the job of evolving Scale AI鈥檚 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鈥 bottomless need for data. And it鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 Llama models exclusively.As Meta battles other AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic for top talent, Droege said he鈥檚 communicating to his employees that Scale is a business undergoing a significant change, and there鈥檚 still an 鈥渆normous opportunity鈥 ahead as the AI industry continues to grow. He also pointed out Scale鈥檚 ability to adapt, as over time the company has taken on different kinds of data-related work 鈥 from autonomous vehicles to generative AI 鈥 and worked with enterprise and government customers.鈥淭his is an extremely agile company,鈥 he said.