On June 12, 2025 Scale AI announced what it called the next phase of its company evolution: a “significant new investment from Meta Platforms, Inc. that values Scale at over $29 billion.” In the same announcement, Scale’s founder Alexandr Wang said he was joining Meta to work on its AI efforts while remaining a director on Scale’s board, and Scale named its chief strategy officer Jason Droege as interim chief executive officer. News reports valued the transaction at $14.3 billion for a 49 percent non-voting stake.
Scale AI is a major supplier of labeled training data and data-pipeline services to AI developers. Meta’s investment left Scale operating as an independent company while substantially expanding the commercial relationship between the two.
At Meta, Wang became the company’s first chief AI officer and led a newly formed organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs, which Meta announced later that month to consolidate its foundation-model, product, and research teams under a single banner.
Why business readers should care: the Scale AI deal is a leading example of the “reverse acquihire” pattern of 2024-2025, in which a large company takes a minority stake in a startup and hires its founder and key staff rather than buying the company outright - a structure that secures talent and technology while attracting less antitrust scrutiny than a full acquisition.