Scale AI YC Application

Summer 2016Active

Scale AI went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2016 batch as a B2B company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Summer 2016
Industry: B2BEngineering, Product and Design
Team size: 500
Status: Active
Launched: 2016

Founders

Alexandr WangFounder/CEO

What Scale AI does

Scale accelerates the development of AI within organizations of any size to deliver critical business insights and operational efficiency. Its data-centric infrastructure platform leverages RLHF (Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback) to help organizations build the strongest AI models that supercharge their business, with customers across industries including Meta, Microsoft, U.S. Army, DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit, Open AI, General Motors, Toyota Research Institute, Brex, Instacart and Flexport.

Scale AI's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Scale AI, Summer 2016 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Scale AI

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Data-centric infrastructure for AI development

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We're building a platform that helps organizations collect, label, and manage the data they need to train better AI models. Our tools focus on integrating human feedback directly into model training, improving accuracy and reliability. Customers use our system to accelerate AI development by improving their data quality and annotation process.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We live in San Francisco, CA and the company is based here.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where our network is, where we have access to engineering talent, and where many AI-driven companies and potential customers are located.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Scale AI YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Scale AI's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Scale AI would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.