Francis deSouza
Chief Executive Officer
2026 – Present
0 years (current)
Legacy
Former Illumina CEO and Google Cloud COO, appointed CEO effective August 10, 2026 to grow the applications business.
Scale AI, Inc.
Leadership History
3 leaders · 2016 to present
Francis deSouza is the CEO of Scale AI, in the role since 2026. The first chief executive was Alexandr Wang, from 2016.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Francis deSouza | Chief Executive Officer | 2026 | Present | < 1 |
| Jason Droege | Interim Chief Executive Officer | 2025 | 2026 | 1 |
| Alexandr Wang | Co-Founder, former CEO and Chairman | 2016 | 2025 | 9 |
Scale AI sits between the people who build AI models and the organizations that use them. For labs it provides the human-written examples, rankings and test sets used to train and grade models. For enterprises and governments it builds the applications that put those models to work. The company updated its mission in September 2025 to developing reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Scale AI earns money in two ways. Its data business charges AI labs and large technology companies for training data, reinforcement learning environments and model evaluations, produced by software pipelines plus a paid contributor network run through Outlier and Remotasks; the company says it has paid contributors more than $1 billion over ten years. Its applications business sells and deploys generative AI systems built on the Scale GenAI Platform and Donovan to enterprises and governments, typically through multi-year contracts. Scale does not publish revenue by segment. It said the data business became profitable in the second half of 2025 and that applications revenue more than doubled in that period.
Chief Executive Officer
2026 – Present
0 years (current)
Former Illumina CEO and Google Cloud COO, appointed CEO effective August 10, 2026 to grow the applications business.
Interim Chief Executive Officer
2025 – 2026
1 year
Former chief strategy officer and Uber Eats founder who led Scale through the post-Meta-deal restructuring.
Co-Founder, former CEO and Chairman
2016 – 2025
9 years
Co-founded Scale and ran it until June 2025, when he joined Meta; remains chairman of the board.
Scale's biggest challenge since June 2025 has been neutrality. Meta's 49% stake led OpenAI and Google to wind down data work, removing large lab customers almost overnight, while newer rivals such as Surge AI and Mercor won lab budgets. The company also faces contractor lawsuits over pay and working conditions, a long-running debate about how much human data labs will need as synthetic data improves, and the job of turning government and enterprise pilots into steady recurring revenue under a new CEO.
Alexandr Wang has served as the Chief Executive Officer of Scale AI since co-founding the company in June 2016 at the age of 19.
Alexandr Wang grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where both of his parents were nuclear physicists working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A prodigy in competitive mathematics and national coding olympiads, he enrolled at MIT at age 17 to study computer science and mathematics before dropping out after freshman year.
In May 2022, Forbes named 25-year-old Alexandr Wang the world's youngest self-made billionaire following Scale AI's Series E funding round, which valued the company at $7.3 billion and pegged his estimated personal net worth at $1 billion.
Before founding Scale, Wang worked as a software engineer at fintech startup Addepar and as an algorithm and tech lead at question-and-answer platform Quora, where he developed an obsession with machine learning infrastructure bottlenecks.
Wang is known for intense work ethic, rapid decision velocity, and deep technical immersion. He personally writes code, interviews senior researchers, and champions a high-urgency culture that values speed of execution over Silicon Valley corporate bureaucracy.
Unlike many Silicon Valley leaders who avoided military tech contracts in the late 2010s, Wang openly embraced the US Department of Defense, declaring that Western democracies must lead in artificial intelligence to safeguard global security and deter authoritarian adversaries.
In July 2023, Wang testified before the House Armed Services Committee on AI and national security, outlining the technological race between the US and China and urging the military to treat data as a strategic national asset akin to uranium or oil reserves.
Scale's senior leadership team includes seasoned executives such as Dan Levine (Accel Partner and Board Director), Vijay Karunamurthy (Field CTO), and senior defense leaders recruited from DARPA, Palantir, and the Pentagon.
In early 2023, Wang made the difficult decision to reduce full-time headcount by approximately 20% to streamline operations, pivot resources away from legacy visual labeling, and double down on generative AI RLHF and government defense software.
Wang serves on multiple national defense and AI advisory boards, regularly briefing members of Congress, Five Eyes defense officials, and the White House National Security Council on frontier AI safety, compute export controls, and AI readiness.
Wang advocates for transparent, empirical model evaluations through Scale SEAL, arguing that corporate AI labs should not be allowed to grade their own homework, and that independent third-party testing is crucial for public trust.
Following the $1 billion Series F funding round in 2024, Alexandr Wang retains a substantial multi-billion-dollar equity stake in Scale AI, cementing his control over company strategy and long-term product direction.
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