Scale AI Valuation 2026: Still $29B as of October 21, No New Round Since Meta

As of October 21, 2026, Scale AI is worth $29 billion — the number implied by Meta's $14.3 billion purchase of a 49% stake in June 2025, more than double the company's $13.8 billion valuation just thirteen months earlier.

That's the short answer. The longer answer is that the Meta deal did two things at once: it handed Scale AI's early investors and founder Alexandr Wang a massive markup, and it triggered defections among the very AI labs whose training-data business built that valuation in the first place. OpenAI left; Google reportedly paused its work, then came back. Sixteen months later, as of October 2026, no new priced round has been reported for Scale, while two of its closest rivals have doubled their own valuations chasing the clients Scale lost. See Scale AI's live funding and valuation record on its Pulse company page.

Scale AI Valuation: Key Numbers (as of October 21, 2026)

The $29B figure comes from a 49% non-voting stake purchase, not a traditional priced venture round. Revenue figures are what Scale told Forbes in May 2026; Scale has not published audited financials.

Scale AI Valuation History

The Meta transaction was a 49% non-voting stake purchase, not a traditional priced venture round — it is the most recent market-implied valuation regardless, and we found no new priced round or secondary reported since. Scale's announcement put that valuation at "over $29 billion"; the $14.3B amount and 49% stake are as reported by CNBC. The Series E valuation is TechCrunch's "around $7 billion"; Scale's own Series E announcement did not state one.

What Is Scale AI's Valuation in 2026?

Scale AI's valuation is roughly $29 billion, a figure derived from Meta paying $14.3 billion for a 49% non-voting stake in June 2025 — not from a traditional priced venture round. That $29 billion mark is more than double the $13.8 billion valuation Scale carried after its $1 billion Series F in May 2024, and as of October 2026 it remains the company's most recent market-implied valuation: we found no independent round or secondary sale reported since the Meta transaction.

The structure of the deal matters as much as the number. Meta's stake is non-voting, which let Scale AI continue operating as a legally independent company rather than becoming a subsidiary — a distinction that mattered enormously to the customers who, until that point, trusted Scale with sensitive model-training data. As part of the deal, Scale AI founder and CEO Alexandr Wang joined Meta's superintelligence research team directly, and Jason Droege, previously Scale's chief strategy officer, ran the company as interim CEO from June 2025. In July 2026, Scale's board appointed Francis deSouza as CEO, effective August 10, 2026. DeSouza previously served as Google Cloud's chief operating officer and, before that, as Illumina's CEO. The announcement lists Wang as Scale's founder and chairman of the board.

Scale AI Valuation vs. the Rest of the Data-Labeling Market

Scale AI still holds the top valuation in the AI training-data sector, but the field closed in fast during 2026. Ranked by most recent known or in-talks valuation:

Meta/Scale AI deal terms, June 2025 (Scale AI); TechCrunch/Forbes, July 2026 (Mercor); Seeking Alpha, 2025 (Surge AI); PitchBook/Frontier Ventures, March 2025 (Turing); Snorkel AI, Sep 2026 (Snorkel AI); companiesmarketcap.com, June 2026 (Appen, converted from AUD)

Data

AI Training-Data Company Valuations, 2026 ($B)

Item	Value
Appen	~$0.3B
Turing	$2.2B
Snorkel AI	$3.5B
Surge AI	$15–25B
Mercor	$20B
Scale AI	$29B

The Full Comparison Table: Valuations, Revenue, and Last Round

Figures are 2025–2026 estimates blended from Meta's disclosed deal terms, TechCrunch, Forbes (Scale AI revenue), PitchBook, and companiesmarketcap.com. Snorkel AI's $350M round at a $3.5B valuation is from its Sep 22, 2026 announcement; the Series E label and the run rate (which CEO Alex Ratner said crossed $375M that week) are from Snorkel's blog post on the round, also reported by TechCrunch. Mercor and Surge AI figures reflect reported in-talks valuations as of July 2026, not closed rounds. Appen's market cap is converted from AUD and fluctuates with ASX trading.

What Scale AI's $29 Billion Valuation Cost the Company

The markup came with a real business cost. Within weeks of the Meta announcement, OpenAI dropped Scale AI as a data provider, and Google — which had planned to pay Scale $200 million that year, according to a Reuters report summarized by TechCrunch — reportedly dropped Scale as a data-labeling vendor at first too. Microsoft was also reportedly looking to pull back at the time. The concern was straightforward: with Meta holding a 49% stake and a board-adjacent relationship through Wang, competitors worried their proprietary training data and model-development plans could leak into Meta's own AI roadmap, even with contractual firewalls in place. Scale's general counsel publicly denied that Meta would receive preferential access to other customers' data, but the reassurance didn't stop the first walkouts. Not all of them stuck. Forbes reported in May 2026 that Google resumed its work with Scale a few months after the deal, according to two people familiar with the situation, and that OpenAI was the highest-profile loss. Jason Droege, who ran Scale after Wang left, told Forbes that most of the labs have come back as customers, "but not all of them."

The company responded with layoffs — roughly 200 employees and 500 contractors cut in July 2025 as it restructured its generative-AI data unit — and a pivot toward government and enterprise AI tooling rather than pure data-labeling volume. Revenue kept growing through the disruption: Scale told Forbes in May 2026 that it tallied just shy of $1 billion in revenue in 2025, up from $870 million in 2024, and that it expects to top $1 billion in 2026. Scale's own January 2026 year-end blog post called 2025 "our biggest year of revenue ever, driven by over $1B in new business." Scale's CFO told CNBC in November 2025 that both the data and applications businesses were growing, with revenue "well into the nine figures," while declining to share more specific numbers. (That CNBC article also said a Scale spokesperson had put 2024 revenue at close to $1 billion in August 2025; this page uses the more specific figures Scale later gave Forbes.) Either way, Scale's growth is far slower than Mercor's, whose run rate roughly doubled to $2 billion in four months over the same stretch by directly absorbing the clients Scale AI lost.

What the headline misses

A $29 billion price tag reads as validation, but it's a single data point from a single, unusual transaction — a 49% non-voting stake sale, not a competitive priced round with multiple bidders setting the market price. Sixteen months on, no other investor has stepped in to confirm or challenge that number, which is itself a signal: the companies best positioned to know Scale AI's real trajectory are the AI labs that buy its data, and the most prominent one to leave, OpenAI, walked away rather than writing a new check. Appen's collapse from a roughly $4 billion valuation in 2020 to under $400 million today is the sector's live reminder that data-labeling valuations can compress fast once growth slows or a structural conflict of interest scares off the biggest buyers.