Surge AI Reportedly Targeting $1 Billion in First-Ever Fundraise

Data labeling company Surge AI is reportedly planning a $1 billion funding round.

The firm has hired advisors for the capital raise, which would be the company’s first, Reuters reported Tuesday (July 1), citing sources familiar with the matter.

Those sources said Surge, founded by former Google and Meta engineer Edwin Chen, is aiming for a valuation of more than $15 billion.

According to the report, the company took in more than $1 billion in revenue last year, while its better-known rival, Scale AI, reported $870 million in revenue in the same period.

Scale was valued at nearly $29 billion when Meta took a 49% stake in the company and hired away CEO Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer for its new Superintelligence Labs.

The Reuters report notes that Surge is benefitting from Scale AI’s customer losses in the wake Meta’s investment, as are competitors like OpenAI and Google.

Google had been Scale’s largest customer, and is now among the companies planning to move away from the platform due to concerns that being tied to Scale could expose their research priorities to Meta. Scale has said its business is strong, and it is committed to guarding customer data, the Reuters report added.

In other artificial intelligence (AI) news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the increasing number of chief financial officers (CFOs) who see generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as “very” or “extremely” important to their companies.

The ranks of these executives have about doubled across use cases, according to the forthcoming CAIO report from PYMNTS Intelligence.

“These high-impact companies are also pulling away from the pack when it comes to deploying GenAI effectively in their businesses,” PYMNTS wrote. “While most companies use GenAI to generate content, high-impact firms tend to use it for more strategic and advanced functions while lower-impact firms mainly are using the technology for entry-level tasks.”

Among high-impact companies, the three main use cases for GenAI product and service innovation; generating real-time, automated responses to customer queries; and developing contextualized emails or recommendations. Each was mentioned by 87.5% of CFOs.

The importance of these use cases have nearly or more than doubled compared to a year ago, according to the CFOs interviewed for the report.

“Among medium- and low-impact companies — those in which GenAI still remains in early to mid-stage deployment or relegated to entry-level tasks — CFOs generally see smaller gains or even declines in the impact of GenAI on their businesses, year over year,” PYMNTS added.

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