AI start-up Scale secures $18 million Series B funding

Scale has raised $18 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with Accel, Y Combinator, Drew Houston, and Justin Kan joining. Mike Volpi of Index Ventures will be joining the company's board.

Scale aims to accelerate the development of AI applications. The start-up is a strong believers in the transformational impact of AI and deep learning across every piece of the global economy, from manufacturing and agriculture to autonomous vehicles and security. Deep learning is eating the world in computer vision, models that outperform humans have become standard.When Scale was founded, its primary aim was to solve the problem of data labeling. The company saw parallels between building web software before cloud computing and AI development today. Before cloud computing, a significant hurdle to building on the internet was building and operating large server farms to power software. Ultimately, that activation energy prevented many applications from being built. In the same way, a significant hurdle to building machine learning is building the capability to label large datasets.

The start-up is aiming to accomplish exactly what cloud computing did, offer reliable, cost-effective, scalable infrastructure to make it easier to build incredible applications.

In autonomous driving, one of the most prominent applications of deep learning today, Scale has become the industry standard for labeling data. They've partnered with many industry leaders such as GM Cruise, Lyft, Zoox, and nuTonomy. Additionally the company labeled more than 200,000 miles of self-driving data (about the distance to the moon). Scale is also used by tech giants like Airbnb and Pinterest, and Fortune 500 companies like P&G and Liberty Mutual.