Zilliz vs Scale AI

Scale AI has a disclosed valuation of $29B, while Zilliz's valuation is not publicly available, making a direct size comparison difficult. Scale AI employs 1,000 people.

Scale AI has raised more in total funding at $15.9B, compared to Zilliz's $113M — a gap of $15.8B. Combined, the two companies have completed 6 known funding rounds.

Scale AI leads with an Awaira Score of 84/100, while Zilliz sits at 65/100. That 19-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Zilliz was founded by Charles Xie in 2017. Scale AI was founded by Alexandr Wang in 2016. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Zilliz: Zilliz is the commercial company behind Milvus, the most widely deployed open-source vector database, and operates Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed vector database service built on that foundation. Milvus supports billion-scale vector collections with high throughput and low-latency query performance, and is widely used in AI search, recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation applications.\n\nThe company raised approximately 113 million USD and has established Milvus as a standard component of the AI infrastructure stack at large technology companies and enterprises globally, with substantial adoption in China, the United States, and Southeast Asia. The open-source project has accumulated tens of thousands of GitHub stars and an active contributor community across academic and commercial organizations.\n\nZilliz occupies a strategically important position in the vector database market as the steward of the most mature open-source option in the category. Enterprise customers who start with Milvus often migrate to Zilliz Cloud for managed operations, giving the company a land-and-expand motion built on open-source adoption. This model positions Zilliz to capture a large share of the growing enterprise vector infrastructure market as AI workloads move from experimentation to mission-critical production. Scale AI: Scale AI is a data infrastructure company founded in 2016 that specializes in data labeling and annotation services for artificial intelligence model development. The company provides managed workforce solutions and software platforms that enable organizations to prepare high-quality training data at scale. Scale AI's core offerings include data labeling, model evaluation, data generation, and managed workforce services across computer vision, natural language processing, and other AI domains. The company serves enterprise customers across automotive, defense, technology, and other sectors requiring large-scale data annotation for machine learning applications. Notable use cases include autonomous vehicle development, where precise labeled data is critical for training perception systems. Scale AI operates a hybrid model combining software automation with human-in-the-loop annotation capabilities. With a Series F valuation of $13.8 billion and total funding of $1.6 billion, Scale AI represents one of the highest-valued data infrastructure companies in the AI stack. The company competes in the data labeling market alongside firms like Labelbox, Snorkel AI, and various in-house solutions deployed by large technology companies. Its growth trajectory reflects increasing enterprise demand for quality training data as AI model development accelerates. Scale AI's positioning emphasizes enterprise-grade reliability, security, and quality assurance in data preparation workflows. Scale AI has achieved unicorn valuation by solving the critical bottleneck of high-quality labeled data production at enterprise scale.

Scale AI got there first, launching in 2016 — that's 1 year of extra runway. Zilliz didn't arrive until 2017. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

Zilliz has about 100-500 employees; Scale AI has about 1,000. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both Zilliz and Scale AI compete in AI Infrastructure, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.