TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang is coming to Disrupt 2024

Comment

The early victors in the AI gold rush are selling the picks and shovels needed to develop and apply artificial intelligence. Just take a look at data-labeling startup Scale AI — and its long and diverse list of customers and investors.

The San Francisco-based startup, founded in 2016, developed software that labels image, text, voice and video data used by companies to train machine learning models. Scale AI got its start supplying companies like Nuro and Zoox with the labeled data needed to train machine learning models for autonomous vehicles. The business soon expanded into government, e-commerce, enterprise automation and robotics companies. Today, Scale AI’s customer list includes GM, OpenAI, Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Defense. 

It’s attracted investors too. The company recently raised $1 billion in a Series F round with a $13.8 billion valuation from early backer Accel as well as institutional and corporate investors such as Amazon and Meta.

The upshot: Scale AI, and its CEO and co-founder Alexandr Wang, sit at the center of the AI boom. We’re excited to announce that Wang, who started Scale AI as a student at MIT at the age of 19, is coming to Disrupt 2024 on October 28-30 in San Francisco.

During our fireside interview with Wang, we’ll move past the hype and dig into the business of AI, where the industry is headed and how Scale will continue to evolve. Plus, lots more! 

Don’t miss Disrupt 2024, where hundreds of investors, founders, tech pioneers, builders and policy makers come together to learn and connect. Buy your tickets today

More TechCrunch

According to a recent Dealroom report on the Spanish tech ecosystem, the combined enterprise value of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023. In the latest confirmation of this upward trend, Madrid-based…

Spain’s exposure to climate change helps Madrid-based VC Seaya close €300M climate tech fund

Forestay, an emerging VC based out of Geneva, Switzerland, has been busy. This week it closed its second fund, Forestay Capital II, at a hard cap of $220 million. The…

Forestay, Europe’s newest $220M growth-stage VC fund, will focus on AI

Threads, Meta’s alternative to Twitter, just celebrated its first birthday. After launching on July 5 last year, the social network has reached 175 million monthly active users — that’s a…

A year later, what Threads could learn from other social networks

J2 Ventures, a firm led mostly by U.S. military veterans, announced on Thursday that it has raised a $150 million second fund. The Boston-based firm invests in startups whose products…

J2 Ventures, focused on military healthcare, grabs $150M for its second fund

HealthEquity said in an 8-K filing with the SEC that it detected “anomalous behavior by a personal use device belonging to a business partner.”

HealthEquity says data breach is an ‘isolated incident’

Roll20 said that on June 29 it had detected that a “bad actor” gained access to an account on the company’s administrative website for one hour.

Roll20, an online tabletop role-playing game platform, discloses data breach

Fisker has a willing buyer for its remaining inventory of all-electric Ocean SUVs, and has asked the Delaware Bankruptcy Court judge overseeing its Chapter 11 case to approve the sale.…

Fisker asks bankruptcy court to sell its EVs at average of $14,000 each

Teddy Solomon just moved to a new house in Palo Alto, so he turned to the Stanford community on Fizz to furnish his room. “Every time I show up to…

Fizz, the anonymous Gen Z social app, adds a marketplace for college students

With increasing competition for what is, essentially, still a small number of hard tech and deep tech deals, Sidney Scott realized it would be a challenge for smaller funds like…

Why deep tech VC Driving Forces is shutting down

A guide to turn off reactions on your iPhone and Mac so you don’t get surprised by effects during work video calls.

How to turn off those silly video call reactions on iPhone and Mac

Amazon has decided to discontinue its Astro for Business device, a security robot for small- and medium-sized businesses, just seven months after launch.  In an email sent to customers and…

Amazon retires its Astro for Business security robot after only 7 months

Hiya, folks, and welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “Chevron deference,” a 40-year-old ruling on federal agencies’ power that required…

This Week in AI: With Chevron’s demise, AI regulation seems dead in the water

Noplace had already gone viral ahead of its public launch because of its feature that allows users to express themselves by customizing the colors of their profile.

noplace, a mashup of Twitter and Myspace for Gen Z, hits No. 1 on the App Store

Cloudflare analyzed AI bot and crawler traffic to fine-tune automatic bot detection models.

Cloudflare launches a tool to combat AI bots

Twilio says “threat actors were able to identify” phone numbers of people who use the two-factor app Authy.

Twilio says hackers identified cell phone numbers of two-factor app Authy users

The news brings closure to more than two years of volleying back and forth between some of the biggest names in additive manufacturing.

Nano Dimension is buying Desktop Metal

Planning to attend TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 with your team? Maximize your team-building time and your company’s impact across the entire conference when you bring your team. Groups of 4 to…

Groups save big at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

As more music streaming apps and creation tools emerge to compete for users’ attention, social music-sharing app Popster is getting two new features to grow its user base: an AI…

Music video-sharing app Popster uses generative AI and lets artists remix videos

Meta’s Threads now has more than 175 million monthly active users, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday. The announcement comes two days away from Threads’ first anniversary. Zuckerberg revealed back in…

Threads nears its one-year anniversary with more than 175M monthly active users

Cartken and its diminutive sidewalk delivery robots first rolled into the world with a narrow charter: carrying everything from burritos and bento boxes to pizza and pad thai that last…

From burritos to biotech: How robotics startup Cartken found its AV niche

Ashwin Nandakumar and Ashwin Jainarayanan were working on their doctorates at adjacent departments in Oxford, but they didn’t know each other. Nandakumar, who was studying oncology, one day stumbled across…

Granza Bio grabs $7M seed from Felicis and YC to advance delivery of cancer treatments

LG has acquired an 80% stake in Athom, a Dutch smart home company and maker of the Homey smart home hub. According to LG’s announcement, it will purchase the remaining…

LG acquires smart home platform Athom to bring third-party connectivity to its ThinQ ecosytem

CoinDCX, India’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, is expanding internationally through the acquisition of BitOasis, a digital asset platform in the Middle East and North Africa, the companies said Wednesday. The Bengaluru-based…

CoinDCX acquires BitOasis in international expansion push

Collaborative document features are being made available inside Proton Drive, further extending the company’s trademark pitch of robust security.

In a major update, Proton adds privacy-safe document collaboration to Drive, its freemium E2EE cloud storage service

Telegram launched a digital currency called Stars for in-app use last month. Now, the company is expanding its use cases to paid content. The chat app is also allowing channels…

Telegram lets creators share paid content to channels

For the past couple of years, innovation has been accelerating in new materials development. And a new French startup called Altrove plans to play a role in this innovation cycle.…

Altrove uses AI models and lab automation to create new materials

The Indian social media platform Koo, which positioned itself as a competitor to Elon Musk’s X, is ceasing operations after its last-resort acquisition talks with Dailyhunt collapsed. Despite securing over…

Indian social network Koo is shutting down as buyout talks collapse

Apiday leverages AI to save time for its customers. But like legacy consultants, it also offers human expertise.

Europe is still serious about ESG, and Apiday is helping companies comply

Google totally dodges the question of how much energy is AI is using — perhaps because the answer is “way more than we’d care to say.”

Google’s environmental report pointedly avoids AI’s actual energy cost

SpaceX’s ambitious plans to launch its Starship mega-rocket up to 44 times per year from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center are causing a stir among some of its competitors. Late last…

SpaceX wants to launch up to 120 times a year from Florida — and competitors aren’t happy about it