When we started Scale nearly five years ago, our mission was to accelerate the development of AI. Today, I’m proud to say that we’re seeing this mission come to life, as customers across industries, from finance to e-commerce to transportation to government, are shipping AI projects that touch our everyday lives.
But we’re still just scratching the surface of the potential that AI has to transform every business and industry, which is why we’re happy to share that Scale has raised $325 million in Series E funding, co-led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks Capital, and Tiger Global. Additional new investors in the round include Wellington Management and Durable Capital followed by existing investors Coatue, Index, Founders Fund, and YC. The interest and opportunity for AI is only accelerating, and this new funding will help us continue to expand our team and products to meet this growing demand. Additionally, Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer business, will be joining as Advisor to the CEO.
"The AI industry is at an inflection point where every business is looking to implement an AI strategy and we are starting to see a real-world impact. We believe Alex and his team at Scale have been critical to enabling businesses across industries reap the full benefits of AI and are taking the industry from proof of concept to reality," said Neil Mehta, Founder and Managing Partner at Greenoaks Capital.
As we discussed with over 9,000 of the leading minds in AI at our inaugural Scale Transform conference, we’re moving from a theoretical and research based industry to one that’s rooted in impact and real business results. However, making this shift means companies are facing new challenges, which requires a systematic, data-centric approach to rapidly deploy their most important models.
At Scale, we’re building the foundation to enable organizations to manage the entire AI lifecycle. Whether they have an AI team in-house or need a fully managed models-as-a-service approach, we partner with our customers to build their strategy from the ground up and ensure they have the infrastructure in place to systematically deliver highly-performant models.
We set out to solve this problem by starting with an essential building block, data annotation. Building on our expertise in delivering high-quality training data to world-leading machine learning teams, we are now applying our technical expertise and understanding to close the loop on the ML development lifecycle.
Learn more about how we accelerate ML development with an end-to-end solution.
Driving Real-World Impact
We’ve already seen the impact that the right data infrastructure can bring to our customers. For example, companies like Toyota are paving the way for a future with fully autonomous vehicles, but need massive volumes of high-quality training data to reach this goal. By using our combination approach of machine learning with human insight, Scale was able to improve Toyota’s annotation throughput by 10X in a matter of weeks. For another customer, States Title, Scale improved the accuracy of its document processing to more than 95 percent, freeing up their data science teams to work on actual data science work. And PayPal was able to leverage AI to efficiently validate and categorize millions of products from its partner merchants with our help.
Brex, a high-growth startup reimagining financial systems, partnered with Scale to improve how businesses manage their money. Using our document processing solutions, their customers can now process invoices and pay bills faster and more accurately. We’ve also partnered with Flexport, the platform for global trade, to make historically manual logistics paperwork easier to execute and more accurate. Through our document processing solutions, we’ve enabled increased efficiency and compliance across Flexport's network of global trade stakeholders.
These are just a few examples of how we’ve been supporting our customers. Over the past six months, we’ve continued to see demand growing across industries as leading organizations expand their AI programs. Today our customers range from the Department of Defense and U.S. Air Force; to leading fintechs like Brex, PayPal, and Square; to transport and logistics pioneers like Flexport, General Motors, Luminar, and Oshkosh; to beloved consumer brands and products like Etsy and Pinterest; to some of the world’s largest technology leaders like Samsung and SAP. We’re proud to be trusted by the world’s most ambitious AI teams to build the data foundation that will set their organizations up for success for decades to come. We can’t wait to see what else will be achieved with this technology as our customers continue to prove that production-ready AI isn’t just a pipe dream, but it’s already here.