Our Continued Partnership with Scale

Today, Scale announced that Accel led its Series F, with coverage in Bloomberg and The Financial Times, and others. I’m excited to share my perspective on Scale’s growth since we first partnered with Alex and the team and what today’s news means for them and the broader industry.

We first got to know CEO and founder Alex Wang and the team in 2016 when we led Scale’s Series A. I sent Alex a cold email, and he debated ghosting me. To his credit, he took the meeting. Reflecting on our journey since then, I remain struck by how much progress Scale has made in such a short time and how uniquely poised Alex is to lead the company and the broader AI movement. I chalk that up to both his vision and his self-described “naivete,”—which allows him to see what’s possible when others don’t—myself included.

At Accel, we remain deeply committed to the future of AI. In our 2018 post for Scale’s Series B, we mused about AI’s potential: “We believe AI could be that next macro-trend, affecting the world and making everything it touches higher quality, faster, and cheaper. Slowly at first, but then faster over time. In many ways, AI is the most important derivative of software. For AI to accomplish that, a lot has to happen; foremost is the development of an ecosystem of people, companies, and tools to contribute. Scale’s mission is to accelerate the development of AI applications.”

Here we are today, and Scale and Alex are doing just that.

Scale is now the undisputed leader in solving the data challenges for the world’s most important companies, such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Defense. Every significant large language model (LLM) is now built on top of Scale’s data engine.

Today’s partnership and funding will accelerate this work, helping Scale’s enterprise and government customers continue to deploy AI confidently and safely, especially as the industry moves faster than ever before.

Meeting—let alone collaborating with—a founder like Alex is a rare privilege. We’re honored that Alex has trusted the Accel team with some of Scale’s most important moments, and we look forward to being a committed partner throughout this next phase of growth.

(Lastly, my PR team would kill me if I didn’t link to a recent interview Alex and I did for Accel’s podcast, Spotlight On. You can enjoy it here. [Dan: The PR team added this last bit, but I’m going to let them keep it in :) .])