Private Markets, Angel and Secondary Investing, Sacra

Sacra

Private Markets, Angel and Secondary Investing

Bringing transparency to private markets so investors, founders, and employees can build on conviction. Sacra delivers deeply researched insights on the private companies shaping tomorrow's markets. By surfacing the data, context, and operator perspective that are missing from private markets today, we help secondary buyers and sellers price equity accurately and unlock liquidity for the people building these businesses.

Private Capital Markets

<ul><li>Mid 2022, Scale’s bread-and-butter of autonomous vehicle (AV) data labeling workloads went into a decline alongside falling R&amp;D investment and VC funding, with GM’s Cruise (2021 valuation: $30B) suspending operations and Argo AI (2021 valuation: $7.B), Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT), and Uber (NYSE: UBER) shutting down their AV programs.</li><li>In 2023, Scale’s revenue exploded to $760M ARR, up 162% YoY, with $18B in capital inflows to foundational model companies like OpenAI ($1.3B ARR in 2023), Anthropic ($200M ARR in 2023) and Cohere and generative AI apps like Runway ($237M raised) and Harvey ($106M raised) alongside the integration of gen AI-features into every app.</li><li>The very source of Scale’s near-term revenue re-acceleration poses the gravest long-term existential threat to its business, with LLMs getting closer to parity with humans on data-labeling tasks while being cheap and 20x as fast.</li></ul>

Mid 2022, Scale’s bread-and-butter of autonomous vehicle (AV) data labeling workloads went into a decline alongside falling R&amp;D investment and VC funding, with GM’s Cruise (2021 valuation: $30B) suspending operations and Argo AI (2021 valuation: $7.B), Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT), and Uber (NYSE: UBER) shutting down their AV programs.In 2023, Scale’s revenue exploded to $760M ARR, up 162% YoY, with $18B in capital inflows to foundational model companies like OpenAI ($1.3B ARR in 2023), Anthropic ($200M ARR in 2023) and Cohere and generative AI apps like Runway ($237M raised) and Harvey ($106M raised) alongside the integration of gen AI-features into every app.The very source of Scale’s near-term revenue re-acceleration poses the gravest long-term existential threat to its business, with LLMs getting closer to parity with humans on data-labeling tasks while being cheap and 20x as fast.

<ul><li>Scale (2021 valuation: $7.3B) launched in 2016 as a Mechanical Turk for machine learning, providing an API and workflow into Filipino, Nigerian and Kenyan workers for machine learning data labeling tasks—in 2022, Scale AI grew 61% to ~$290M in revenue.</li><li>In the post-zero interest rate environment of 2022-23, AV data labeling workloads have declined alongside the decreasing investment in R&D—see the closure of AV startups like Argo AI (2021 valuation: $7.5B) and Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT) and Uber (NYSE: UBER) discontinuing their self-driving car units.</li><li>Scale’s vertically integrated platform helps them sell into enterprise and government—who have a greater need for consolidation and a harder time hiring to build and secure their own ML infrastructure—with Scale already winning $300M+ in contracts with the Department of Defense to work on image and text analysis for national security.</li></ul>

Scale (2021 valuation: $7.3B) launched in 2016 as a Mechanical Turk for machine learning, providing an API and workflow into Filipino, Nigerian and Kenyan workers for machine learning data labeling tasks—in 2022, Scale AI grew 61% to ~$290M in revenue.In the post-zero interest rate environment of 2022-23, AV data labeling workloads have declined alongside the decreasing investment in R&D—see the closure of AV startups like Argo AI (2021 valuation: $7.5B) and Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT) and Uber (NYSE: UBER) discontinuing their self-driving car units.Scale’s vertically integrated platform helps them sell into enterprise and government—who have a greater need for consolidation and a harder time hiring to build and secure their own ML infrastructure—with Scale already winning $300M+ in contracts with the Department of Defense to work on image and text analysis for national security.

Scale: The $290M/year Mechanical Turk Of Machine Learning

<ul><li>The data annotation space isn’t going to keep growing like it did earlier because pre-trained models are going to get better and better.</li><li>With regard to the MLOps space that caters to experts, my guess is that it's going to shrink or at least not grow quite as fast as the space that it caters to—the end customer, the non-experts, and the product owner.</li><li>The rise of those companies, Scale, in particular, was tied to the autonomous driving industry that was extremely data-hungry.</li></ul>

The data annotation space isn’t going to keep growing like it did earlier because pre-trained models are going to get better and better.With regard to the MLOps space that caters to experts, my guess is that it's going to shrink or at least not grow quite as fast as the space that it caters to—the end customer, the non-experts, and the product owner.The rise of those companies, Scale, in particular, was tied to the autonomous driving industry that was extremely data-hungry.

Oscar Beijbom, co-founder And CTO Of Nyckel, On The Opportunites In The AI/ML Tooling Market

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Tooling suite for data labeling, model training, and deployment for enterprise ML teams

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Scale AI (AI US)

Scale At $760M ARR

TL;DR: Sacra estimates that Scale grew annual recurring revenue (ARR) 158% to $760M in 2023 riding the LLM wave just as their previous bread-and...

Sacra

Scale: The $290M/year Mechanical Turk Of Machine Learning

Scale (dataset), formerly Scale AI, built a $290M/year revenue business indexed on labeling data for AI in the world of atoms, from autonomous...

Sacra

Oscar Beijbom, co-founder And CTO Of Nyckel, On The Opportunites In The AI/ML Tooling Market

Sacra interview with Oscar Beijbom, co-founder and CTO of Nyckel

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