Powering the Future of AI Safely and Ambitiously: Scale’s Next Chapter

When I first met Alex Wang in 2018, he was a bright young leader with sky-high ambitions. Although he wasn’t yet old enough to get a drink in the bar down the street, the way he talked about what he was building at Scale made it clear he was wise beyond his years.

Around that time, it had become clear to us at Index that AI would be the defining platform shift of the coming decade, equal in magnitude to mobile and the web, and possibly even greater. But we also saw a bottleneck: the models couldn’t learn without massive amounts of clean, structured, high-quality data. That’s where Scale came in.

A year earlier, we had invested in Aurora’s autonomous driving platform, and Chris Urmson, formerly the head of Google’s self-driving project (now Waymo), shared how important labeled data was to their process. He also told us about the company they relied on to annotate that data, and just as importantly, the technical prodigy behind it.

I took a meeting with Alex. Within minutes, two things were obvious: first, the sheer scale of his ambition; and second, how Scale was uniquely positioned to become the data infrastructure layer for the entire AI ecosystem—or as we saw it then, “the AWS for the AI world.”

Fast forward to today, and I can say we got one part wrong: AI has outpaced even our wildest expectations. It’s rewriting the future of every industry, from healthcare and defense to commerce, media, and transportation. And at the heart of that shift is Scale.

What began with labeled data has evolved into something much bigger: a full-stack platform that helps companies and governments fine-tune models, evaluate them for safety and performance, and rapidly deploy them into production. Scale’s customers range from the U.S. government to OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and dozens of enterprises looking to bring AI into their workflows.

Personally, it’s been a joy and a privilege working with Alex over the past eight years—watching him grow as a founder, learning from him, and seeing him build not just a very successful business, but a company that’s committed to keeping AI human and helping the U.S. lead in the global AI race. In just a few years, he’s emerged as one of the defining leaders of the AI era.

Today, I’m thrilled to congratulate Alex on his next chapter: joining Meta to work on its AI efforts. I can’t think of a better person to help shape the future of AI ambitiously and responsibly.

And I’m super excited to congratulate Jason Droege, who will take the reins as Scale’s new interim CEO. Jason is a proven operator with a deep understanding of both AI and enterprise, and I’m confident he’s the right leader for Scale’s next phase of growth.

As AI reshapes our world, Scale will continue to be there, powering the models, infrastructure, and insights that turn raw data into real progress. From everyone at Index, a huge congrats to the entire Scale team on yet another milestone in their journey.