Scale Taps Early Cruise Employee Richard Ni as Head of People

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Scale today announced that Richard Ni has joined the company as Head of People, reporting to CEO Alexandr Wang.

Ni was previously at Cruise, where he was Head of Recruiting for the autonomous car company acquired by General Motors in 2016. The tenth employee at Cruise, Ni helped build up headcount to 700 over just three years – with a particular emphasis on recruiting software and machine learning engineers to pace the company's rapid growth. Ni was also the first technical product manager at Cruise following the GM acquisition, working with the company's Localization, Mapping, LIDAR Segmentation, and Computer Vision teams. Educated at M.I.T. with degrees in computer science and philosophy, Ni also has software development experience at Venmo, the mobile payment service.

At Scale, Ni will lead HR, recruitment and guide the company's internal culture. Scale recently announced $18 million in Series B funding to accelerate customers' AI development by democratizing access to intelligent data. Partnering with autonomous vehicle companies like Lyft, Cruise, and nuTonomy – as well as businesses working in robotics, drones, virtual assistants, and other AI-dependent fields – Scale has grown revenue more than 15x in the past year. These customers deliver Scale raw data that is processed and labeled through machine learning and microtasking to yield scalable and accurate data sets that train AI applications.

"This is certainly an exciting time to be joining Scale," said Richard Ni, incoming Head of People, Scale. "The customer base that's been assembled in just two years really shows the vast market demand for the solution that Scale is able to provide autonomous vehicle companies and a host of other businesses, from Pinterest to Airbnb to Liberty Mutual. My goal is to find the best and the brightest minds who really have a passion for AI. Scale is unique in what it can offer to those individuals, and it's my job to find them and show them exactly what Scale brings to the table."

"We know that hiring talent with AI expertise is particularly competitive," said Wang. "Richard has proven expertise finding the right people – and doing so at scale. This is the right person to take the reins on Scale's recruitment efforts as we head into our next phase of growth; we look forward to building up our business and technical teams with Richard's guidance."

To view open positions at Scale, https://www.scaleapi.com/about#jobs.

About Scale

Scale accelerates the development of AI by democratizing access to intelligent data. By leveraging its API for autonomous vehicles and other use cases, businesses depend on Scale to turn raw information into the human-labeled training data that dependably powers their AI applications. Scale uses a combination of high-quality human task work, smart tools, statistical confidence checks and machine learning to consistently return scalable, precise data. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.

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