AI hiring startup Mercor valued at $10 billion with new funding round
AI startup Mercor on Monday announced a new Series C round valuing the company at $10 billion, a fivefold increase since its last raise in February.
The company said in a blog post that it raised $350 million in a round led by Felicis, who also led a $100 million Series B round with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst and a new investor. robinhood Initiatives.
The new investment will fuel three focus areas: expanding the company’s talent network, improving matching systems between experts and training opportunities, and enabling faster delivery.
Founded by three Thiel Fellows, the company initially began as a recruiting firm that evaluated candidates by analyzing interview transcripts, resumes, and personal portfolio websites to make hiring decisions.
After accidentally creating a network of specialized experts, the startup turned to hiring highly skilled professionals to train its AI models.
Mercor currently manages more than 30,000 contractors who collectively charge more than $1.5 million every day, and the startup teaches agents to think more like humans by “sharing knowledge, experience, and context that can’t be captured in code alone,” the startup wrote in a blog post.
The company was able to take advantage of the switch to data labeling Meta In June, it paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI. As part of the deal, founder and then-CEO Alexandr Wang resigned to join the social media company.
Concerns about Scale AI’s neutrality following Meta’s investment were reportedly raised by some major AI labs. Google and OpenAI will cut ties following the agreement.
“That doesn’t happen very often in startups, where your biggest competitor gets torpedoed overnight,” co-founder Adarsh Hiremath told Forbes.
The startup still faces competition in the data labeling space, including Scale AI rival Surge AI, which is reportedly targeting up to $1 billion in a new raise, according to Reuters. Turing AI reached a $2.2 billion valuation in March, and Invisible Technologies reached a valuation of over $2 billion in September after raising $100 million in a new round.
