Scale
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2016
- HeadquartersSan Francisco, United States
- Headcount1,001–5,000
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
Scale firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Scale
- Legal name
- Scale AI, Inc.
- Website
- https://scale.com
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2016
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 1,001–5,000 employees
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Scale industry classification
Industry- Product category
- AI Data Infrastructure
- NAICS
- Software Publishers (513210), Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (51821)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)
- akta.pro primary industry
- AI Application Enablement Platforms (Copilot/Agent Frameworks, SDKs) (HDAEANAJ)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Enterprise AI Data & Knowledge Platforms (Vector Databases, Knowledge Graphs) (HDAEANAH), AI Observability, Monitoring & Evaluation Platforms (Drift, Quality, Safety) (HDAEANAF), AI/ML Engineering & Model Development Services (BPAEAHAF), Responsible AI, Security & Privacy Platforms (Safety, Guardrails, PII) (HDAEANAG)
Keywords
Where Scale is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- San Francisco
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices3 records
Markets served
Scale business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales
Revenue model
- Enterprise AI Platform and Services: Scale provides AI infrastructure platforms including Data Engine, GenAI Platform, and Donovan to enterprise customers. Revenue generated through platform subscriptions and usage-based pricing for enterprise AI deployments.
- Government and Defense Contracts: Scale AI holds significant government contracts including Pentagon agreements ($500M expanded from $100M), Department of Energy Genesis Mission partnership, and various defense agency engagements.
- Data Labeling and Annotation Services: Core data preparation and annotation services for AI model training, using distributed workforce of contributors with 25% having advanced degrees.
- Model Evaluation and Benchmarking: Scale Labs provides private benchmarks and evaluation services for AI companies, including leaderboards and expert-level evaluations.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | Annual | Enterprise AI platform pricing |
| Subscription | Multi-year contract | Government contract pricing |
Go-to-market motion3 records
Distribution channels5 records
Marketing channels6 records
Scale product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Scale AI provides an end-to-end AI data infrastructure platform that combines human-in-the-loop data labeling, model training, evaluation, and enterprise deployment. Its core offerings include the Scale Data Engine for high-quality training data generation, the Scale GenAI Platform for fine-tuning, testing, and deploying generative AI models, and Scale Donovan for government and defense AI applications. The platform processes multimodal data (text, image, video, audio, code, 3D point cloud) to power AI systems for enterprise, public sector, healthcare, and autonomous applications.
Product overview
Scale AI operates as a comprehensive AI infrastructure company offering a platform-plus-modules architecture centered around three core products: Scale Data Engine (for high-quality training data generation), Scale GenAI Platform (for generative AI deployment), and Scale Donovan (for government/defense applications). The portfolio includes specialized tools like Scale Nucleus for data curation, Scale LLM Test & Evaluation for model assessment, Dialect for AI-native enterprise data layers, Voice Showdown for voice AI benchmarking, and ChatLab for model evaluation. Solution-specific offerings target enterprise agentic deployments, public sector (US and global), healthcare, and insurance verticals. The platform processes text, images, video, audio, structured data, and code modalities, powering AI systems for autonomous vehicles, robotics, defense, healthcare, and eCommerce across 90% of the world's leading generative AI model builders.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- Scale Data Engine: AI-native data layer platform for enterprise data
- Scale GenAI Platform
- Scale Donovan
- Voice Showdown
- Dialect
- Scale Labs
Products and services
- Scale Data Engine A comprehensive data infrastructure platform that sources human contributors (25% with advanced degrees) to generate high-quality training data for AI models. Powers data labeling, annotation, and curation across text, images, video, audio, and 3D point cloud data for frontier AI development. Used by enterprise AI teams and AI model builders.
- Scale GenAI Platform A comprehensive platform for building and deploying generative AI applications, providing fine-tuning, RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback), testing and evaluation, and enterprise deployment capabilities. Supports organizations in adopting LLMs in production with tools for model customization and monitoring.
- Scale Donovan An AI platform designed for U.S. government and defense applications, providing secure AI deployment for intelligence and military operations across NIPR, SIPR, and JWICS networks. Supports the Department of Defense's goal of enterprise-wide AI adoption.
- Scale Nucleus A data management and curation platform for computer vision applications, enabling users to identify points of failure and rare edge cases to optimize model performance. Integrates with SiaSearch technology for fast search across video and LiDAR datasets.
- Scale LLM Test & Evaluation A platform for comprehensive model monitoring, evaluation, and red teaming of large language models. Provides model certification, regression testing, exploratory evaluation, and expert human red teaming capabilities for AI safety assessment.
- Enterprise Agentic Solutions AI deployment solutions for enterprise organizations that find the right use case, build the system, and own the outcome. Includes forward-deployed engineers for enterprise AI implementation.
- US Public Sector Solutions AI infrastructure solutions for U.S. government agencies, including defense, intelligence, and federal civilian applications. Supports Pentagon's CDAO with enterprise agreements and Project Thunderforge.
- Global Public Sector Solutions AI deployment solutions for international government and defense organizations, including partnerships with allied nations for defense AI applications.
- Healthcare AI Solutions AI solutions for healthcare organizations including clinical intelligence, physician cognitive load reduction, and healthcare-specific data processing and annotation.
- Insurance AI Solutions
- Dialect AI-Native Data Layer An AI-native data layer that transforms fragmented enterprise information (databases, PDFs, wikis, ticketing systems) into a coherent, semantically connected environment that AI agents can understand and operate within, powered by a semantic layer that preserves meaning, relationships, and provenance.
- Voice Showdown A global preference-based benchmarking platform for evaluating voice AI models through real human speech and blind comparisons across 60+ languages, revealing capability gaps and multilingual performance disparities.
- ChatLab Scale AI's model-agnostic chat platform with over 500,000 annotators, providing free access to frontier voice models in exchange for blind preference votes and supporting Voice Showdown evaluations.
- Scale Labs Research division conducting frontier AI research, including the Scale Labs leaderboard for private benchmarks and evaluation of AI model capabilities across various domains.
Quantifiable outcome
- 90% of world's leading generative AI model builders are powered by Scale
- +3 more outcomes
Companies that use Scale
Customer profileNamed customers14 records
Segments7 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
Scale technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
AI capability16 records
Feature9 records
Scale partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Eight partnerships are on record, tiered core, flagship and minor.
- Universal RobotscoreScale AI and Universal Robots launched UR AI Trainer at NVIDIA GTC 2026, an imitation learning system that enables industrial robots to learn tasks by observing human operators. The system captures synchronized motion, force, and visual data to train Vision-Language-Action models, bridging the lab-to-factory gap.
- BAE SystemscoreBAE Systems and Scale AI announced strategic partnership to deploy agentic AI capabilities across U.S. Department of War platforms. Collaboration combines BAE's defense operations expertise with Scale's agentic AI suite including Data Engine and Generative AI Platform for combat vehicles and deterrence programs.
- U.S. Department of EnergycoreScale AI signed MOU with Department of Energy to support Genesis Mission, a collaborative AI-for-science initiative bringing together national labs and advanced computing environments. Partnership aims to address data bottlenecks preventing full AI integration in scientific research.
- U.S. Department of Defense (CDAO)flagshipPentagon/CDAO expanded enterprise agreement with Scale AI from $100M to $500M. Production Other Transaction Authority agreement allows any Department of War component to initiate Project Agreements covering Scale's AI products including Data Engine, GenAI Platform, and Donovan.
- Physical IntelligencecorePhysical Intelligence partners with Scale AI for real-world training data to fuel robotic foundation models. Scale provides data collection and annotation infrastructure for physical AI development.
- CarahsoftcoreScale AI's GenAI platform and Test & Evaluation capabilities added to Carahsoft's GSA Schedule contract, enabling streamlined procurement by federal agencies. Supports OMB mandates M-25-21 and M-25-22.
- PalantirminorScale AI is part of technology consortium developing software layer for Trump's $185 billion Golden Dome missile defense project, alongside Palantir and Anduril Industries.
- Anduril IndustriesminorScale AI part of consortium with Anduril and Palantir developing software for Golden Dome antimissile shield initiative.
Scale indicators11 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights7 records
Scale competitors and assessment
Company assessmentBroad incumbents
- AWS (Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth): Hyperscaler offering a managed data labeling service within SageMaker, providing a bundled alternative to Scale Data Engine for enterprise ML teams already on AWS.
- Appen: Large incumbent in training data and human-annotated datasets for ML, offering comparable data labeling services across many of the same enterprise and government buyers.
- Databricks: Broad data and AI platform whose Mosaic AI stack and Unity Catalog overlap with Scale's enterprise AI data infrastructure ambitions, particularly around Dialect and GenAI Platform.
- Palantir Technologies: Defense and enterprise data analytics incumbent; a Golden Dome consortium partner with Scale but also a potential competitor for government AI data and decision-support workloads.
- Anduril Industries: Defense technology company co-selected with Scale for the Golden Dome consortium; an emerging defense AI platform that competes and partners in the same national-security AI space.
- DataRobot: Enterprise AI platform with overlapping positioning on agentic and generative AI deployment, competing for the same enterprise AI productionization budget as Scale's GenAI Platform.
Direct peers
- Surge AI: A leading direct competitor in AI data labeling and RLHF annotation services, targeting many of the same frontier model builders and enterprise AI teams that Scale serves.
- Labelbox: Provides an enterprise data labeling and annotation platform with strong overlap to Scale Data Engine and Nucleus, serving computer vision and generative AI use cases.
- Snorkel AI: Data-centric AI platform focused on programmatic labeling and weak supervision, addressing similar enterprise AI training-data workflows as Scale's Data Engine.
Emerging players
- Roboflow: Focused computer vision data platform and annotation tooling that competes with Scale Nucleus in vision-specific data management and labeling.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat7 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Scale social profiles
Digital presenceScale financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Scale leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles8 records
Scale subsidiaries and ownership
Company hierarchySubsidiaries1 record
Scale funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds10 records
Investors40 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Scale M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A3 records
Investments2 records
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Scale
What does Scale do?
Scale AI provides an end-to-end AI data infrastructure platform that combines human-in-the-loop data labeling, model training, evaluation, and enterprise deployment. Its core offerings include the Scale Data Engine for high-quality training data generation, the Scale GenAI Platform for fine-tuning, testing, and deploying generative AI models, and Scale Donovan for government and defense AI applications. The platform processes multimodal data (text, image, video, audio, code, 3D point cloud) to power AI systems for enterprise, public sector, healthcare, and autonomous applications.
Is Scale a public or private company?
Scale is a private company. It is classified as corporate owned and is currently operating.
When was Scale founded?
Scale was founded in 2016. It employs 1,001 to 5,000 people.
Where is Scale based?
Scale is headquartered in San Francisco, United States, in the North America region.
How does Scale make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. Enterprise AI Platform and Services are the primary driver. The others are government and Defense Contracts, data Labeling and Annotation Services and model Evaluation and Benchmarking.
Who are Scale's main competitors?
Broad incumbents on record are AWS (Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth), Appen, Databricks, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries and DataRobot. Direct peers are Surge AI, Labelbox and Snorkel AI. Roboflow is listed as an emerging player.
Does Scale have an API?
Yes. Scale offers API access through its Scale GenAI Platform and Scale LLM Test & Evaluation platform. Developers can access models via APIs for tasks including fine-tuning, testing, evaluation, and data processing. The Scale Spellbook platform provides API access for model prompting and evaluation workflows. API access appears to be enterprise and partner-facing rather than publicly documented for general developers. Developer documentation is at docs.scale.com.
What industry is Scale in?
Scale's product category is AI Data Infrastructure. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAEANAJ, AI Application Enablement Platforms (Copilot/Agent Frameworks, SDKs), with a secondary code of HDAEANAH, Enterprise AI Data & Knowledge Platforms (Vector Databases, Knowledge Graphs). Its NAICS code is 513210 and its SIC code is 7372.