Expanding the life of AI in the wake of meta turmoil, CFO insists he is not a ‘zombie’

rear meta shocked the tech world in June by announcing plans to invest $14.3 billion in Scale AI, primarily as a way to hire startup founder Alexandr Wang and a small number of employees, but Scale’s future was immediately thrown into question.

OpenAI quickly revealed that it was winding down its work with Scale, which prepares data used by artificial intelligence labs and big tech companies to train models. Companies including google According to multiple media reports, Elon Musk’s xAI also suspended work with Scale after the deal.

But nearly five months after the blockbuster announcement, Scale AI CFO Dennis Cinelli shared a very different message. Companies with more than 1,000 employees are still alive and well, he says.

“People are misinterpreting this deal as some kind of acquisition or some kind of licensing agreement, and that’s not true,” Cinelli, who joined Scale in 2022, told CNBC in an interview. “We are a company that has closed some of the best deals in our history in the last couple of months.”

Founded in 2016, Scale is best known for its data business, competing with companies like Appen, Surge AI, and Mercor. Scale also has an applications business that creates custom solutions to help governments and large enterprises implement AI. The U.S. Department of Defense awarded Scale a $99 million contract in August, followed by another $100 million contract in September.

Mr. Cinelli, 42, said both parts of the business are growing and bringing in revenue “well into nine figures,” but he declined to provide more specific revenue numbers. A spokesperson told CNBC in August that the startup had nearly $1 billion in revenue last year before the Meta deal.

Whether Scale has a viable path forward is a hot topic in Silicon Valley. The meta deal was bundled with a number of acquisitions within the industry, but the price was significantly higher. Since the beginning of last year, microsoft, Amazon Google and Google are each arranging deals to bring in top AI talent and license certain technologies without facing the regulatory hassles of a full-scale acquisition.

In July, Google spent about $2.4 billion hiring Windsurf co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan and other senior R&D employees. The deal included no investment and came with a non-exclusive license to some of the windsurfing technology.

Greg Martin, a managing director at Rainmaker Securities who handles pre-IPO stock sales, called the Metascale deal a “quasi-acquisition” and said investors don’t know what to make of the company because “I don’t feel like we can go public anymore.” He said there is much more investor interest in names like Anthropic and xAI.

“People don’t really understand what the future exit of Scale is going to be,” Martin said. “Or maybe you could already see the exit?”

Scale has been trying to convince potential investors, employees and customers otherwise.

Jason Droge, who was promoted from Scale’s head of strategy to interim CEO following Wang’s departure, said in a blog post days after the deal was announced that the startup is not changing direction or “downsizing.”

Cinelli said Scale continues to work with “all major AI labs and technology companies,” but declined to comment on specific customers.

“We had a conversation and obviously everyone had questions,” he said. “We’re still an independent company, we’re not stuck in the meta, and we’re still doing business with all of our customers. I think after having these conversations, everyone kind of understood.”

OpenAI, Google, and xAI are not currently listed as customers on Scale’s website, and representatives for each company did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment. Meta is designated as the client.

Mr. Wang, now 28, became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire when he founded Scale, according to Forbes, but lost that title to Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan, 27, in October. Although Wang’s departure was a big loss for the company, Cinelli said the “vast majority” of employees are still with the company.

With its investment, Meta holds a 49% stake in the company, valued on paper at $29 billion. However, a Scale spokesperson told CNBC in June that Meta has no voting rights and there is no product integration between the companies.

Cinelli said Scale’s data business has grown every month since the meta deal, and its applications business has doubled in the second half of 2025 compared to the first half. Cinelli said Scale expects the applications division to be the company’s main revenue driver in the future.

Still, the size of the scale has changed. Droge announced in July that the company would lay off 200 full-time employees, about 14% of its workforce.

“These changes will allow us to be more agile and more responsive to market changes and customer needs,” Droege wrote in a memo at the time.

Scale announced Tuesday that it plans to hire 200 people for new roles across all areas of the business. The company has also expanded to large offices in New York, Washington DC, St. Louis, and London.

Scale’s largest hub is in San Francisco, occupying about 180,000 square feet of space previously occupied by Airbnb.

“We’re doubling down on growth,” Cinelli said.

Scale still has a long way to go to justify its latest valuation, which is more than double the $13.8 billion worth at its last funding in 2024. Cinelli said he was confident the issue would “solve itself.”

The company has $1 billion on its balance sheet and doesn’t need to raise more money right away, Cinelli said. There’s also a new focus on scale, which Cinelli says has helped with recruiting and pushed offer acceptance rates to record highs.

Under Wang’s leadership, Scale’s mission was to “strengthen human sovereignty.” At an all-hands meeting in September, Droge introduced a new mission to “develop trusted AI systems for the world’s most important decisions,” a spokesperson said.

Cinelli said all of this will follow a trajectory in stark contrast to public perception.

“If you look at the results we’ve had, we’re not a zombie company,” he said.

WATCH: Meta’s Scale AI contract reveals the battle for top AI talent