Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old founder and CEO of Scale AI, has dominated tech news headlines lately for his appeal to the U.S. government for more support to his industry. Last month, the entrepreneur spoke before Congress about A.I.’s contributions to American job growth and how the U.S. must compete with Chinese A.I. companies, which Wang warned have already caught up to American rivals. In January, Scale AI took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post that featured an open letter to President Trump stating, “America must win the A.I. War.”
Founded in 2016 in San Francisco out of the startup incubator Y Combinator, Scale AI develops software that labels image, text, voice and video data—a laborious but necessary task for building effective A.I. models at scale. In 2022, Wang became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at just 25 years old after Scale AI raised a $325 million funding round that valued the company at $7.3 billion. Last year, Scale raised $1 billion in its Series F round, bumping its valuation to a whopping $13.8 billion. Wang, who owns 15 percent of the company, saw his net worth soar past $2 billion after the round.
In the early days, Scale AI supplied companies like the self-driving company Zoox with the labeled data needed to train autonomous vehicles. It has since expanded into government, e-commerce, robotics and enterprise automation companies. Now, its client list includes OpenAI, Microsoft (MSFT), AirBnb (ABNB), and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Scale AI is backed by some of the biggest names in tech, including Nvidia, Meta and Amazon. Other investors include Accel Ventures,Tiger Global, Index Ventures and Spark Capital.
Wang is the son of two weapons physicists. He grew up in sleepy Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the U.S. developed its first atomic bomb during World War II. As a child, Wang aced national programming competitions. By age 17, he had landed full-time engineering jobs in Silicon Valley with the fintech company Addepar and then Quora, where he met his business partner, Lucy Guo. The summer after his freshman year, Wang co-founded Scale AI with Guo and enrolled in Y Combinator’s Summer 2016 batch. Wang never returned to school.
While in the Y Combinator program, Wang went off the typical book by speaking to investors prior to demo day, an event where the incubator’s latest batch of startups present to an invite-only audience of some 1,500 investors and media members.
Daniel Levine, a partner at Accel Ventures who has invested in Scale AI since its Series A, sent Wang a cold email to connect after the startup’s unplanned feature on Product Hunt, a tech launching pad that allows users to list and discover new products and services. Wang and the team were so nervous about engaging with venture capitalists that they considered ghosting Levine, but ultimately agreed to meet casually for introductions. The courting process took about a month, and that cold email eventually turned into a nearly decade-long partnership. Levine didn’t even see a pitch deck from Wang before investing. And soon after, Wang and Guo were working out of Levine’s basement in San Francisco.
