A few companies have done better than scale to show the need for AI gold rush soon and to fill this gap. The startup rightly identified that one of the most important tasks in creating effective AI – the rigorous practice of data tagging in the proper training of new AI agents – was that companies focused on that area of technology would also be the most willing to outsource companies.
CEO and co-founder Alex Wang has credited them with this success since its inception, including raising more than $277 million in revenue for the initial support of investors, including Accel’s Dan Levine, and achieving break-even status in terms of revenue. Axel took part in four financing rounds on the H scale, which you did not include as part of the funding agency received from YC in 2016, all so in last week’s episode of Extra Crunch Live we saw how first deal with Levin and Wang came together and its effective relationship years later. We talked about how it was over the years.
The scale story begins with a premise and begins with a bit of breaking the rules – Wang Demo talks to investors the day before, usually closing the YC book when Levine cold-emailed him after seeing the scale in Product Hunt. The product hunt spot not planned, either – Wang was surprised to see his company look like someone else’s.
Levine, however, saw the conch of something with huge potential and, despite being relatively unknown to the then VC, did not want the opportunity to pass him or Wang. Both Wang and Levine were able to give some great feedback about the decks submitted to our regular pitch deck teardown section, although Levine never saw the pitch deck from Wang before actually investing (more on that later).
As mentioned, the initial investment scale on Levine and Axel comes from a transferred email when the product appeared on Hunt. Wang said the team had just released the initial version of the scale and then noticed that it was in the product hunt – it had submitted by someone else. The response from the community was encouraging, and it reached out to Levine via email. “One of the side effects, one of the results is that we got this cool email from Dan,” he said. “We didn’t really know anything until Dan had his cool email. So much like the great story started with the bold, cool email. In addition, we put a lot of pressure on it at the time, because at YCC they tell you quite specifically, ‘Hey, don’t talk to any VC during the batch,’ and we were in the middle of the batch.”
