Our Continued Investment in Scale: Accelerating and Democratizing Access to AI

Scale announced a new milestone today and Ashlee Vance covered the news for Bloomberg. Scale also wrote about the news and what it means for their team in their blog here.

Accel is thrilled to have been a part of the Scale story for the last three years and even more excited for what the future holds.

Scale is building infrastructure to accelerate and democratize access to AI.

The company is off to an incredible start providing high-quality labeled data to autonomous vehicle companies. Scale has built the best solution in the space and promptly signed up the top partners in the space including Waymo, Nuro, Lyft, Zoox, Toyota, and more. Those wins make Scale one of the fastest growing businesses Accel has ever seen. There’s a lot more to do to support the autonomous vehicle space, and Scale is going to double down to further accelerate the development of such an important technology.

To fulfill our vision of accelerating and democratizing access to AI, we’ve started doing more. As Scale has emerged as a leading provider of AI infrastructure, more and more companies have reached out for help. In response, we are adding new capabilities to Scale:

1. We are broadening our high-quality data product beyond autonomous vehicles to all of computer vision and NLP. We’ve already partnered with cutting edge companies like OpenAI, Airbnb, and Pinterest.
2. Enterprises recognize the value of AI to improve quality and save money in various parts of their business, often complementing the adoption of technologies like RPA as part of digital transformation. They want a complete enterprise-grade solution, rather than just high-quality data. Helping enterprises is a key part of democratizing access to AI, and so we are working with select enterprises to offer more complete AI solutions.

Ping Scale to learn more: https://scale.com/sales

At Accel, we partner with exceptional entrepreneurs at inception and support them in building iconic companies. It’s an incredible privilege, and I can’t believe it’s a real job. When we first partnered with Alex at Scale just three years ago, he was a 19-year old figuring out life as a professional/founder/CEO all at once on the fly. When he accepted Accel’s investment he took a chance on an unproven, young investor doing the same. We’ve supported each other personally and professionally over the last three years and created some amazing memories along the way: Scale’s office was once my basement, Halloween costumes (Alex was an excellent carrot), birthdays, Alex meeting my first child, etc. It’s been a pleasure so far.

There’s a long way left to go, but I’m even more excited about the future of Scale than I was when we made our initial investment.