Tech unicorn Scale AI raises $100mn in Series C funding

San Francisco AI and machine learning startup Scale AI has announced the raising of $100mn of funding.

The company’s Series C funding round was led by venture capitalists Founders Fund, with the support of Accel, Coatue Management, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Thrive Capital, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger and Adam d’Angelo. That investment values the business at more than $1bn, making it the latest tech Unicorn.

In a blog post, Scale’s 22 year old CEO Alexandr Wang hailed the company’s meteoric rise in the past three years and set out his philosophy that AI development represents a fundamental shift from traditional software, owing to the importance of data over code. Dropping out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wang previously worked at Quora before founding Scale in 2016.

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Scale specialises in providing labelled datasets, critical to the construction of machine learning models. Developers send raw data to the company via its API, and Scale then uses a mixture of machine learning and manual labour to label and then return the data, opening up machine learning to a wider audience of companies.

Scale’s clients include the likes of Waymo, OpenAI, Nuro and Lyft, with its training data being used across a wide variety of industries with machine learning opportunities. These include autonomous vehicles, language processing, mapping and robotics.