This High School Dropout’s $7.3 Billion
AI Startup Is Powering Everything From
The Military To Your Domino’s Order
ALEXANDR WANG
FOUNDER & CEO, SCALE AI
When Alexandr Wang moved to Silicon Valley in 2014, he was
a 17-year-old high school dropout with just a few coding competition wins on his resume.
But the son of Chinese immigrants was desperate to escape his sleepy hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, so he packed his bags and couch surfed across San Francisco as he pitched various tech CEOs on why they should take a chance on him. “My resume was sparse,” says the now 24-year-old Wang, who eventually convinced Adam D’Angelo to hire him at Quora. “I basically just said, ‘I love coding, and I’m just going to be a speed racer for you.’”
Wang’s pitch has hardly changed now that he sits at the helm of his high-flying artificial intelligence company, Scale AI. Scale promises to take clients’ dormant data and transform it into artificial intelligence applications that increase their efficiency. Wang likes to say that Scale operates like “a chef”; it takes the ingredients that companies have lying around and transforms them into a full meal. The pitch appears to be working: In just five years since its founding, the San Francisco-based company has raised over $620 million at a $7.3 billion valuation while attracting clients like the U.S. Air Force, PayPal, Pinterest and General Motors.
The idea for Scale came to Wang during a stint at MIT, which he briefly attended after two years at Quora. The scrappy student became convinced that one of his roommates was stealing his food, so he decided to set up a camera to catch the culprit in the act. That’s when he ran into a roadblock: The video camera mostly just left him with massive amounts of video footage. He realized it would require a complex AI application to be smart enough to label the imagery and notify him when his food was actually taken. Though he never caught the thief, the failed experiment did get him thinking about all the other companies that have on-hand data that’s not being used to its full potential.
“When we started, AI was a buzzword, but not a lot of people were actually using it outside of big tech companies,” explains Wang, who soon became a two-time dropout when he left MIT to found Scale in 2016. “Our aim with Scale, even from the early days, was to be the company that was able to renew American industries with AI capability and make it so that, all of a sudden, we empower these businesses to be able to build with AI, whereas otherwise it would be really difficult.”
The car industry is at the top of his list of American sectors ripe for innovation. In addition to building out self-driving capabilities for industry stalwarts like General Motors, Scale has helped others, like Domino’s, capitalize on the new technology. Earlier this year the pizza company debuted autonomous delivery vehicles across Houston. Domino’s deployed self-driving car company Nuro’s R2 robot, which relies on Scale to rapidly identify its surroundings and inform its movements.
Wang has also set his sights on transforming the military. Last month, the Pentagon's first chief software officer, Nicolas Chaillan, resigned in protest as he declared that the United States has already lost the AI battle to China, claiming U.S. cybersecurity is at a “kindergarten level.” That’s not acceptable to Wang, and he’s already working with the Department of Defense to expedite America’s capabilities.
“This market is a lot bigger than you think … Scale has a bunch of government applications,
but I now see them selling a lot to the largest tech companies, like the Facebooks and the DoorDashes of the world,” explains Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi, who was one of the first investors to write a check to the company. “They’re taking this thing that was largely developed for autonomous vehicles and stretching it out into more and more industry verticals.”
Our aim with Scale
... was to be the company that was able to renew American industries with AI capability and make it so that, all of a sudden,
we empower these businesses to be able to build with AI.”
