After losing the big OpenAI deal, Scale's expected annual revenue surpasses $1 billion, and its enterprise application business will overtake data annotation within 18 months.

AIMPACT News, May 15 (UTC+8): According to Beating Monitoring, nearly a year after Meta spent $14 billion to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI and took away its founder, Alexandr Wang, the company’s current CEO, Jason Droege, disclosed that the company’s expected revenue this year will exceed $1 billion. To break away from reliance on a single business, Scale’s core strategy is shifting from data annotation to developing internal AI applications for government and enterprise clients. Its annualized revenue in this line of business has already reached $200 million, and Droege expects it will surpass data annotation within 18 months to become the company’s largest revenue source.

Although the M&A deal in June last year—despite locking in a five-year contract with Meta worth at least $450 million per year—also led to the direct loss of OpenAI, the most important early customer that helped it start out. Amid concerns about Meta’s equity stake, competitors revealed that Scale has recently been clearly marginalized in the competition for data annotation contracts. In response, Droege said that accelerating the transformation is not because customers are rejecting it, but because the overall growth rate of the data annotation market is slowing down, while service demand from large enterprises for the shift to AI has only just started to open up.

Under the new strategy, Scale’s application business has been progressing quickly. On the enterprise side, it has signed deals with Ernst & Young and the Mayo Clinic; on the government side, it has repeatedly secured major orders. Last week, the U.S. Department of Defense granted Scale a $500 million Project Thunderforge contract to connect AI agents to military mission planning. Last month, Scale was also jointly selected with companies such as Palantir for the Golden Dome missile defense project, with a total budget of $185 billion. Investors at Coatue believe that having both large-model training experience and the capability to deploy for government and enterprise clients is Scale’s unique edge for maintaining its high valuation and continuing to push forward with an IPO.

(Source: BlockBeats)