Mercor
Headquarters
San Francisco, CAFounded
2023CEO / Founder
Brendan FoodyEmployees
201-500Funding
Series C — $484MProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
8.0/10Website
mercor.com
Profile updated
About 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.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Mercor
All products by Mercor reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
Competitive Landscape
Who Mercor competes with, and how they differ.
Scale AI runs the largest AI-data-labeling pipeline and, like Mercor, now recruits skilled contractors for model training and evaluation; the two clashed in a September 2025 trade-secrets lawsuit after Scale accused a former employee of taking customer files to Mercor, and several AI labs later shifted work away from Scale following Meta's 2024 investment and hire-away of its CEO.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedSurge AI is a similarly-sized ($20B+ valued) expert-contractor and RLHF data platform serving frontier AI labs, named alongside Scale AI as Mercor's closest rival in press coverage; unlike Mercor it has stayed almost entirely private, disclosing few details about its operations, funding or workforce.
Labelbox is a data-labeling and RLHF platform (via its Alignerr expert-annotator network) serving AI labs, positioned more as annotation tooling plus a labeling workforce than Mercor's talent-marketplace model, which recruits and directly bills out named domain experts - doctors, lawyers, ex-bankers - by the hour.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Turing began as a remote software-developer staffing marketplace and later added an AI-training/evaluation line (Turing AGI Advancement) that competes with Mercor for AI-lab contracts, though its core business remains engineering placement rather than cross-industry expert data work.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Mercor's history, with sources.
- Acquisition
Acquires Deeptune
Mercor acquired AI-agent training-simulation startup Deeptune in July 2026 for an undisclosed sum; CEO Brendan Foody had been an angel investor in Deeptune's $43M funding round three months earlier.
thenextweb.com - Funding
Series C - $350M led by Felicis at $10B valuation
Mercor raised a $350M Series C led by Felicis Ventures with Benchmark, General Catalyst and new investor Robinhood Ventures, quintupling its valuation to $10B eight months after its Series B and making its three 22-year-old co-founders self-made billionaires.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series B - $100M led by Felicis at $2B valuation
Mercor raised a $100M Series B led by Felicis Ventures, with Benchmark, General Catalyst, DST Global and Menlo Ventures participating, valuing the AI-training-data talent marketplace at $2B about a year after its Series A.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series A - $32M led by Benchmark at $250M valuation
Mercor raised a $32M Series A led by Benchmark Capital, valuing the company at $250M.
techcrunch.com - Founded
Founded in San Francisco
Mercor was founded in San Francisco by three former high-school debate teammates - Brendan Foody (CEO), Adarsh Hiremath (CTO) and Surya Midha (COO) - who dropped out of college to build an AI-training-data talent marketplace.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Seed round - $3.6M led by General Catalyst
Mercor raised a $3.6M seed round led by General Catalyst shortly after being founded.
techcrunch.com
Explore AI Software Reviews
Browse multi-perspective AI panel reviews across hundreds of AI tools, agents, and platforms. Find the right software with insights from CTO, Developer, Marketer, Finance, and User perspectives.