Mercor

Mercor operates a marketplace that connects domain experts with AI laboratories that need human data for model training and evaluation. The company was founded in 2023 by Brendan Foody (CEO), Adarsh Hiremath (CTO), and Surya Midha (chairman), three high-school friends from the Bay Area, and is headquartered in San Francisco.

The platform recruits engineers, physicians, lawyers, bankers, and other professionals, vets them with AI-driven interviews, and places them on training-data and evaluation projects for customers including OpenAI and Anthropic. As of late 2025 Mercor managed a roster of more than 30,000 contractors, paying out over $1.5 million per day at average rates above $85 per hour. The company also publishes the APEX benchmark family, which measures AI model performance on economically valuable professional tasks, and hired former Uber chief product officer Sundeep Jain as its first president in May 2025.

Mercor has raised roughly $484 million: a $3.6 million seed round in 2023, a $30 million Series A led by Benchmark in September 2024 at a $250 million valuation, a $100 million Series B led by Felicis in February 2025 at a $2 billion valuation, and a $350 million Series C led by Felicis in October 2025 that valued the company at $10 billion. The Series C made the three founders, then 22, the youngest self-made billionaires on record; the company employed about 300 full-time staff as of 2025.