Alexandr Wang, 28-year-old AI-scale founder and CEO, has recently dominated technology news headlines as he calls the U.S. government for more support for his industry. Last month, entrepreneurs talked about AI’s contribution to U.S. job growth and the U.S. must compete with Chinese AI companies, Wang warned that the company has caught up with U.S. competitors. In January, Scale AI released the entire page advertise In the Washington Post, an open letter was issued to President Trump, saying: “The United States must win the AI war.”
Founded in San Francisco in 2016, Scale AI developed software for labeling images, text, voice and video data from the launcher Y combiner, a hard and necessary task for building effective AI models at scale. In 2022, Wang became the youngest homemade billionaire in the world at the age of 25, with AI AI raising $325 million in financing, with an estimated $7.3 billion in the company. Last year, Scale raised $1 billion in its F Series, raising its valuation to $13.8 billion. Wang owns 15% of the company and his net worth soared by $2 billion after the turn.
In the early days, Scaile AI provided companies like Zoox, the self-driving company, with the label data needed to train self-driving cars. Since then, it has expanded to government, e-commerce, robotics and enterprise automation companies. Now, its customer list includes OpenAI, Microsoft (MSFT), Airbnb (ABNB), and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Scale AI has been supported by some well-known figures in the technology, including Nvidia, Meta and Amazon. Other investors include Accel Ventures, Tiger Global, Index Ventures and Spark Capital.
Wang is the son of two weapon physicists. He grew up in New Mexico's sleepy Los Alamos, where the United States developed its first atomic bomb during World War II. When Wang was a child, he was a national programming competition. By the age of 17, he found a full-time engineering job in Silicon Valley with fintech companies Addepar and Quora, where he met his business partner Lucy Guo. In the summer after freshman year, Wang and Guo co-founded Scale AI and participated in Y Combinator's 2016 summer batch. Wang never returned to school.
In the Y combination program,,,,, Wang talked to investors a few days ago, thus breaking away from the typical book, the event is the incubator’s latest batch of startups to invite the audience to about 1,500 investors and media members.
Daniel Levine, a partner at Accel Ventures, has invested in scale AI since the A Series A, sending Wang a cold email after the startup planned unplanned features on its product Hunt, a technology launch pad that allows users to list and discover new products and services. Wang and the team are so nervous about interacting with venture capitalists that they think Ghost Levine, but ultimately agree to meet casually for an introduction. The courting process took about a month and the cold email ended up turning into a partnership that lasted nearly a decade. Levine didn't even see King's pitch deck before investing. Not long after, Wang and Guo worked in Levine's basement in San Francisco.
