As Alexandr Wang walked down the staircase to the open atrium at Scale AI headquarters in San Francisco last June, employees didn’t know if he was still their boss. A day earlier, the data labeling company had announced a bombshell deal: Meta was acquiring 49% of Scale for $14 billion, and its founder CEO was leaving to lead Mark Zuckerberg’s newly-formed superintelligence lab. Amid a swirl of confusion, many Scale employees thought he had already left. So, surprised to see him, the workers applauded as he headed to the stage for the company all-hands. “I literally teared up,” Wang tells Forbes now. “In another life, I'd be so excited to continue at Scale.”

He doesn’t remember exactly what he told them at the meeting, but according to one person in attendance, Wang began by recounting how he’d started building Scale as a freshman at MIT, then started to cry. “This is so stupid. Why am I doing this?” the person recalled him saying.

Wang’s remark was in reference to his tears, but it seemed like an apt question to apply to the entire situation. In the wake of the surprise deal, which had leaked a few days earlier, all of Silicon Valley was similarly asking: Why was Wang giving up his own growing company, then worth $13.8 billion, to go work for Meta, which was playing catch-up in AI to Google, OpenAI and Anthropic?

Scale had been a powerhouse in the market of human data, where armies of clickworkers and experts — like PhDs, lawyers and engineers — generate data to train cutting edge AI models like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Scale had also become a go-to vendor for the Department of War since it first brought large language models to the Pentagon in 2020. And the operation had, for a moment, turned Wang into the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. Now the tie-up with Meta threatened to railroad what had become a stalwart business providing infrastructure to the most valuable companies in AI. After all, the thinking went, what frontier lab would want to entrust its data to a company almost half-owned by Meta?

Wang, who took roughly ten Scale employees with him to Meta, says now that it was an “incredible opportunity” for both companies. The other half of the all-hands meeting was Wang formally introducing his successor Jason Droege, previously Scale’s chief strategy officer, and before that an executive at Uber and Axon, the company that makes the Taser gun. Despite all the drama of the previous week, the meeting itself was a tight 30 minutes, with no Q&A from employees. Instead, Wang and Droege kept it quick. “We shake hands, give each other a hug, say we're both excited about our futures,” recalls Droege. “And then the next moment, we've got to go do it.” (Droege still holds the “interim” CEO title, but internally he’s seen as its long-term leader.)

“We definitely anticipated turbulence. There's no question. I mean, the facts of the situation are, our founder went to another lab to help them.” Jason Droege, CEO, Scale

“We definitely anticipated turbulence. There's no question. I mean, the facts of the situation are, our founder went to another lab to help them.”

Almost one year on from the deal announcement — and a decade after its founding in May 2016 — Scale unsurprisingly looks like a much different company. Droege’s first order of business as CEO was to shift the company’s investment away from the data labeling business, and toward a model where it helps large enterprise companies, like Ernst & Young, Paramount and Cisco, as well as public sector clients, like the U.S. milidevelop their own internal AI applications.

The strategy appears to have paid off. Scale tells Forbes it tallied just shy of $1 billion in revenue last year, up from $870 million the year before. (Throughout the entire history of the company, it has brought in $2.5 billion in revenue.) Part of the revenue growth could be a lot of........

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