On June 12, Scale AI — a leading artificial intelligence company — announced one of the largest private funding rounds in the industry, securing $14.3 billion from Meta as a strategic investor. This investment brings the company’s pre-money valuation to $30.61 billion.
According to Toloka.vc, the Ukrainian venture syndicate that invested in Scale.com just eight months ago, this represents a 2.18x return on the original investment price.
As part of the deal, Meta will acquire 49% of Scale’s shares, while the startup will continue to operate independently. Scale’s co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang will also join Meta to collaborate on AI initiatives, while remaining on Scale's Board of Directors and continuing to support the company’s mission of advancing AI while preserving human values.
This round is unique in that Scale will distribute a portion of the funds as dividends to all shareholders. For Toloka.vc’s partners, the dividend payout equals 112.2% of their original investment, totaling nearly $2.3 million.
According to Bloomberg, early investor Accel is expected to receive $2.5 billion in dividend payouts.
This marks the first dividend-based return for Toloka.vc in an investment round. It is considered by the syndicate to be more favorable than a traditional exit, as investors not only receive a partial return but also retain their equity stake in Scale.
The internal rate of return (IRR) on invested capital is estimated at 139.05% per annum in USD, based on an 8-month investment period.
“This came as a bit of a surprise. Such outcomes are rare in venture capital. When we invested, we projected a 2–3x return in 2–3 years. Now that possibility seems to be approaching quickly. While this is not a full exit, the dividend payout is great news for our partners. Even better is that we retain our equity and remain shareholders of Scale, which we estimate has the potential to grow to $62–107 billion in value,” said Taras Kyrychenko, General Partner at Toloka.vc.
Today, Scale AI is a leading data labeling provider for major AI players and large corporations, including OpenAI, Facebook, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, General Motors, Toyota Research Institute, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce. The company also works closely with the U.S. Department of Defense, federal agencies, and the White House.
Data labeling is the process of human annotation of data to train AI/ML models. This step is essential for applications across computer vision, speech recognition, emotion analysis, natural language processing, healthcare (e.g., annotating medical images and clinical records), retail (customer behavior analysis, product categorization), finance (fraud detection, risk assessment), robotics, agriculture, and more.
Scale.AI: Exceptional Growth Trajectory
Over the past eight years, Scale has demonstrated remarkable growth:
- In July 2021, Scale reached a valuation of $7 billion, driven by rising demand for data labeling across sectors.
- In January 2022, the company secured a $249 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to accelerate AI capabilities for government agencies.
- In March 2024, Scale was valued at $13 billion following a funding round led by Accel.
- By May 2024, Scale received an additional $1 billion investment from Amazon and Meta, pushing its valuation to $14 billion. The Series F round became one of the largest in history, totaling $1 billion from top-tier investors.
- As of February 2024, Scale had earned nearly $80 million through government contracts.
- According to PitchBook, Scale ended 2024 with ~$1.3 billion in revenue.
- Scale.AI has publicly announced its growth target of reaching $2 billion in revenue by 2025.
About Toloka.vc
Toloka.vc is a Ukrainian venture syndicate founded in 2023 by Taras Kyrychenko, Ihor Shoifot, and Oleksandr Kolb. Within just one year, Toloka.vc became one of Ukraine’s fastest-growing syndicates by both deal volume and capital deployed. Today, it boasts over 1,300 investors and has facilitated 17 investments totaling over $17 million in high-growth companies, including Bolt.com, Scan.com, Scale.com, Citibox.com, Finn.com, BrightSec.com, Jome.com and others.
