About Mercor
Mercor was founded in January 2023 by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, three Thiel Fellows and former high school debate teammates who started the company while still college students at Georgetown and Harvard, originally launching as an AI-driven hiring platform that analyzed interview transcripts, resumes, and portfolios to help companies make recruiting decisions, before pivoting decisively toward a considerably more specific and lucrative opportunity: connecting leading AI labs with highly specialized human experts, including doctors, lawyers, scientists, and other domain professionals, needed to generate high-quality training and evaluation data for frontier AI models.
Mercor's business model charges a fee, reportedly around 30%, on top of the hourly rate its network of specialized experts, drawing from a global pool exceeding 300,000 professionals, earns for AI training-related work, with the company according to press reports, paying out more than $2 million per day to its contractor network as it has scaled. The company's rise accelerated as demand for AI training data grew and shifted across providers in the market, with Mercor emerging as a significant competitor alongside companies including Surge AI. According to press reports, Mercor's valuation climbed from $250 million in 2024, to $2 billion in February 2025, to $10 billion following an October 2025 Series C, with its three young founders, all in their early twenties, reportedly becoming some of the youngest self-made billionaires as a result. Mercor has raised funding from investors including Felicis, Benchmark, and General Catalyst.
