Eye on AI | Fortune Limitless

Alexandr Wang, cofounder and CEO of Scale AI, in San Francisco on Aug. 8, 2019. (Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Call it the world’s most expensive acqui-hire.

Scale AI on Thursday formally announced a $14.3 billion investment by Meta that includes the hire of the San Francisco startup’s cofounder and CEO, Alexandr Wang, “to work on Meta’s AI efforts” as part of the larger company’s so-called superintelligence team. (He’ll remain on the board of Scale.)

The deal values the nine-year-old startup at more than $29 billion and reportedly gives Meta a 49% stake via nonvoting shares. 

Jason Droege, the startup’s chief strategy officer, will become interim CEO.

As with many well-funded AI companies, a who’s who of investors backed Scale, including firms Accel, Coatue, DFJ, Index, Thrive, Spark, Tiger Global, Greenoaks, and Wellington; companies Amazon, AMD, Cisco, Meta, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and ServiceNow; and individuals Elad Gil and Nat Friedman.

“Meta’s investment recognizes Scale’s accomplishments to date and reaffirms that our path forward—like that of AI—is limitless,” Wang said in a statement.

Scale doesn’t make AI models; the company works with corporations to prepare their data for AI systems and build them custom applications for the purpose.

With the deal, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is demonstrating a change in strategy as he moves to keep up with rivals. 

The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp has never been shy about an acquisition but has largely shunned major investments in startups—unlike Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—preferring instead to build within. —AN

Shares of the San Francisco payments company Chime jumped 37% in their Nasdaq debut on Thursday.

The company’s long-awaited IPO valued the company at $11.6 billion. Chime had raised about $700 million in its offering.

Chime shares, trading under CHYM, closed the day at $37.11—well above its $27 IPO price and valuing the company at $13.5 billion.

For all the day-one trading spectacle, Chime’s value is actually quite a bit less than it used to be. 

During its last major fundraising round in 2021—an eon ago in tech, but—investors valued the company at $25 billion.

Still, Chime’s success in seeing its offering through is another win for the fintech category, which has for years waited on the IPO sidelines for market conditions to change. 

Trading firm eToro and stablecoin company Circle also went public in recent months; Bullish, Gemini, Klarna, Monzo, and Revolut wait in the wings.

Chime offers fee-free mobile banking services, principally to U.S. customers who earn less than $100,000 per year. The company reported $519 million in revenue and $13 million in profit in its most recent quarter. —AN

Google said Thursday that it had resolved a brief but global service disruption to its Google Cloud products that knocked out service to a number of major services.

Among them: Music streamer Spotify, communications platform Discord, and AI services including Character.AI and Replit. 

The outage lasted about five hours and began in the middle of the U.S. workday.

"The issue with Google Chat, Google Meet, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Cloud Search, Google Tasks, Google Voice has been resolved for all affected users," the Alphabet-owned company said.

Google hasn’t yet pointed to a reason for the outage. It promised that it would share more information once it completed its internal investigation.

For what it’s worth: Neither Amazon Web Services nor Microsoft Azure reported outages. —AN