Scale AI
Scale AI builds data annotation pipelines, model-evaluation platforms, and government AI decision-support tools for defense and enterprise customers.
Background
Scale AI was founded in San Francisco in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo to solve the data-labeling bottleneck blocking production AI deployments.
Wang, who became sole CEO after Guo's departure, built the company into the dominant third-party data annotation and model-evaluation platform; Jason Droege is reported as current CEO following organizational changes tied to Meta's 2025 investment.
Scale's core product stack combines automated labeling software with managed human annotators to produce training datasets for image, text, voice, video, and document AI.
Its government-facing layer includes Scale Donovan, a decision-support platform for intelligence analysis and mission operations, and Defense Llama, a jointly developed Scale-Meta defense-oriented large language model.
Scale reaches DoD customers primarily through direct prime contracts and other transaction authority agreements, and through Thunderforge, a DoD AI-agent program for military planning in which Scale holds the prime contract with Anduril and Microsoft as partners. The company employed approximately 1,200 people as of 2025.