On June 12, Scale AI - the first company in the field of artificial intelligence - announced one of the largest investment rounds in the project, amounting to $14.3 billion from its strategic partner Meta, which raised the company’s valuation to $30.61B pre-money (this is a x2.18 return compared to the price at which the syndicate partners invested 8 months ago).
In exchange for this investment, Meta will receive 49% of the company’s shares, and the startup will continue to develop independently, as stated in the official press release. Additionally, the co-founder of the project, Alexander Wang, will join Meta to collaborate on AI projects. Wang will continue to serve as the director on Scale's Board of Directors and will focus on supporting Scale’s work in developing AI potential and preserving human values first and foremost.
The uniqueness of this investment round lies in the fact that, in connection with this deal, Scale is distributing part of the funds as dividends to all company shareholders. The payout amount to the syndicate partners is 112.2% of the investment amount, with the total payout reaching nearly $2.3 million.
For example, Accel, which supported the company in its early stage, is expected to receive payouts of $2.5 billion, according to Bloomberg.
For Toloka.vc, this is the first case of receiving dividend income during an investment round. This can be seen as a better option than a full exit, as syndicate participants will not only receive a partial return on their investments but will also remain shareholders of the company (!). The income math on invested funds amounts to 139.05% annually in USD(calculated over 8 months from the investment date to the announcement).
“This is somewhat of a surprise for us. Such cases are quite rare in the venture capital market. When we invested, we expected to grow the capital of syndicate participants by 2–3 times in 2–3 years. It seems that this opportunity is approaching now. It’s not yet an exit, but receiving dividends is good news for our participants. Even better news is that we are keeping our share and remain shareholders of the Scale project, which, in our estimation, has the potential to grow to $62–107 billion. We are looking forward to more news for our participants,” commented Taras Kyrychenko, one of the general partners of the Toloka.vc syndicate.
Data labeling is the process of preparing data by humans for use in training AI/ML models. Human involvement is necessary to add annotations - labels or explanations to the data - so that algorithms can learn to recognize patterns and make decisions based on this labeled information. This is a crucial step in training models in all fields using complex ML models, such as: computer vision, speech recognition, emotion analysis, natural language processing, healthcare (labeling medical images, clinical records, disease histories, and meaningful human thoughts), retail (customer behavior analysis and product categorization), finance (fraud detection, risk assessment), robotics, agriculture, and many others.
Scale.AI’s exceptional growth and success trajectory:
Over the course of 8 years, the company has demonstrated impressive growth:
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