AI hiring startup Mercor valued at $10 billion with new funding round

Artificial intelligence startup Mercor announced on Monday a new Series C round that values 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, which also led its $100 million Series B round, with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and new investor Robinhood Ventures.

The new investment will feed into three focus areas: Expanding the company’s talent network, advancing its matching systems between experts and training opportunities, and providing faster delivery.

Founded in by three Thiel Fellows, the company initially started as a hiring company that assessed candidates by analyzing interview transcripts, resumes and personal portfolio websites to make recruiting decisions.

After inadvertently amassing a network of specialized experts, the startup has pivoted to hiring highly skilled professionals to train AI models.

Mercor now manages over 30,000 contractors, who are collectively paid over $1.5 million each day and teach 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 pivot to data-labeling after Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI in June. As part of the deal, founder and then CEO Alexandr Wang stepped down to join the social media company.

Concerns over Scale AI’s neutrality following the Meta investment reportedly caused some large AI labs, including Google and OpenAI, to cut ties following the deal.

“It just doesn’t happen too often in startups where your biggest competitor gets torpedoed overnight,” cofounder Adarsh Hiremath told Forbes.

The startup still faces competition in the data-labeling space, including Scale AI rival Surge AI, which is reportedly aiming for up to $1 billion in a new raise, according to Reuters. Turing AI reached a valuation of $2.2 billion in March, and Invisible Technologies raised $100 million in a new round to reach a value of over $2 billion in September.