A year after its founder left for Meta, Scale AI has a new boss. The choice says a lot about where the company is heading. It has named Francis deSouza, a veteran enterprise-cloud executive, as chief executive.
deSouza starts on 10 August, Scale announced. He replaces interim chief Jason Droege, who ran the company after founder Alexandr Wang left in 2025 to lead Meta’s AI effort. Meta had just put $14.3bn into Scale.
A salesman, not a scientist
deSouza’s CV is enterprise sales, not model research. He was chief operating officer of Google Cloud. Before that he ran the genomics firm Illumina, growing its revenue past $4.5bn.
Axios read the hire plainly: Scale wants to look like an enterprise AI company, not a data-labelling shop. deSouza told it that companies “understand the value and the potential of AI, but they want help realising that potential.” He called that “a very, very big need.”
