Mercor

Quick read

Mercor, an AI-powered expert hiring and data annotation platform, was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. It connects doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other domain experts with frontier AI labs — including OpenAI, Anthropic, and six of the Magnificent Seven — to label data and evaluate model outputs. In 17 months, revenue run rate grew from $1M to $500M; the company now pays over $1.5M per day to its 30,000+ contractors.

Key facts

Founded

2023

Founders

Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha

Employees

30+

Sectors

ai, enterprise, marketplace

Website

www.mercor.com

Mission

Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy — matching vetted domain experts (engineers, lawyers, doctors, bankers) with frontier AI labs and enterprises to train models, run evaluations, and produce high-quality labeled data.

Recent activity

• Apr 2026press
  Bloomberg Businessweek published a feature on Mercor's mission to replicate professional work, interviewing co-founders Adarsh Hiremath and Brendan Foody in San Francisco. bloomberg.com
• Apr 2026press
  Mercor disclosed it was affected by a supply chain attack involving LiteLLM, potentially exposing customer and contractor biometric and ID document data. The security team contained and remediated the incident. linkedin.com
• Jan 2026product
  Released APEX-Agents, an open-source AI benchmarking report covering 480 tasks across investment banking, management consulting, and corporate law, testing leading models from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. en.wikipedia.org
• Oct 2025fundraise
  Raised $350M Series C at a $10B valuation, led by Felicis, General Catalyst, and Benchmark. Valuation is a fivefold increase since the February 2025 raise. cnbc.com
• Oct 2025press
  Bloomberg named Mercor to its list of 24 AI Startups to Watch in 2026, in the Foundation Builders category. en.wikipedia.org
• Oct 2025press
  Co-founders Brendan Foody (CEO), Adarsh Hiremath (CTO), and Surya Midha (board chairman) became the youngest self-made billionaires ever, surpassing Mark Zuckerberg's record, following the $10B valuation. ndtv.com
• Feb 2025fundraise
  Raised $100M at a $2B valuation ahead of the Series C. techfundingnews.com
• Sep 2024fundraise
  Raised $30M Series A led by Benchmark, with personal investments from Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, Adam D'Angelo, and Larry Summers. Benchmark partner Victor Lazarte joined the board. techstartups.com

Key people

Named individuals at the firm. We don't expose direct email or phone — use their LinkedIn for outreach.

• Brendan Foody · Co-founder & CEO
  Brief →
• Adarsh Hiremath · Co-founder & CTO
• Surya Midha · Co-founder & Board Chairman

Sources

• Mercor - Wikipedia
• AI hiring startup Mercor valued at $10 billion with new funding round
• Inside the meteoric rise of Mercor - Big Think
• Bloomberg Businessweek: AI Company Hiring on LinkedIn
• Three AI Founders Become World's Youngest Self-Made Billionaires
• Mercor raises $30M Series A led by Benchmark
• How Mercor's human-in-the-loop AI platform went from college dropouts to $10B startup
• Mercor — Organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy

Other companies in United States

• OpenAI · AI lab, San Francisco·
• Anthropic · AI safety lab, San Francisco·
• Stripe · Payments infrastructure, San Francisco·
• Microsoft · Big tech, Redmond·
• NVIDIA · AI hardware, Santa Clara·
• Databricks · Data + AI platform, San Francisco

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