Alexandr Wang grew up in the shadow of New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Lab, the top-secret site where the United States developed its first atomic bomb during World War II. His parents were physicists who worked on weapons projects for the military. Now he does too: Wang’s San Francisco–based company, Scale AI, has already inked three contracts worth some $350 million or more, contingent on the government’s needs, to help America’s Air Force and Army employ artificial intelligence.

Scale’s technology analyzes satellite images much faster than human analysts to determine how much damage Russian bombs are causing in Ukraine. It’s useful not just for the military. More than 300 companies, including General Motors and Flexport, use Scale, which Wang started when he was 19, to help them pan gold from rivers of raw information—millions of shipping documents, say, or raw footage from self-driving cars.

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