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

• Jul 2026fundraise
  Mercor is in talks to raise $500 million at a $20 billion valuation — double its $10 billion Series C set nine months earlier. Bloomberg and Forbes both reported at least one term sheet at that valuation. If closed, co-CEOs Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha would each be worth roughly $4.3 billion. Felicis Ventures led prior rounds; new investor participation is unconfirmed. forbes.com
• Jul 2026investment
  Mercor acquired AI simulation startup Deeptune. en.wikipedia.org
• Jul 2026product
  Head of Product Osvald Nitski said on the '20VC' podcast that Mercor has dropped take-home interview assignments — too easy to complete with AI — in favour of whiteboard interviews and live discussions that test judgment and system design thinking. businessinsider.com
• Jun 2026press
  Mercor crossed $2 billion in annualized gross revenue, doubling from $1 billion hit in February 2026. The company reached $1B ARR to $2B ARR in roughly four months. forbes.com
• May 2026press
  At least seven class-action lawsuits were filed against Mercor after the March 2026 data breach exposed contractor job interview recordings, facial biometric data, and screenshots of workers' computers. simplify.jobs
• Mar 2026press
  A supply-chain attack on the LiteLLM open-source Python library exposed up to 4 terabytes of Mercor's internal data and contractor personally identifiable information. Meta paused all work with Mercor indefinitely in response. Mercor said its own investigation found impacts to customer and contractor data were 'very limited'. OpenAI and Anthropic continued as active clients. techstory.in
• Jan 2026product
  Mercor published its first APEX-Agents benchmarking report, measuring how well leading AI models handle agentic business tasks. GPT-5 led with a 64.2% score. siliconvalleyinvestclub.com
• Jul 2026fundraise
  Mercor is in talks to raise $500M at a $20B valuation, doubling its October 2025 valuation. A source familiar with the deal told Forbes the round has not yet closed. If it does, co-CEOs Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath, and board chairman Surya Midha would each be worth an estimated $4.3B. forbes.com
• Mar 2026press
  Mercor was hit by a supply-chain attack involving the LiteLLM package, potentially exposing up to 4TB of internal data and contractor PII. The incident triggered multiple class-action lawsuits and a temporary pause in work from major clients including Meta while forensic investigations ran. en.wikipedia.org
• Jan 2026product
  Mercor expanded to New York City, opening an office there. linkedin.com
• Oct 2025fundraise
  Mercor closed a $350M Series C led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from Benchmark and General Catalyst, at a $10B valuation — a fivefold increase from its February 2025 raise. The company was paying $1.5M per day to its network of 30,000+ contractors at the time of announcement. cnbc.com
• Oct 2025press
  Bloomberg named Mercor in its list of 24 AI Startups to Watch in 2026, placing it in the Foundation Builders category. en.wikipedia.org

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
• https://geeksaroundglobe.com/the-worlds-youngest-self-made-billionaires-are-three-22-year-olds-behind-ai-giant-mercor/
• https://rossclennett.com/2025/10/job-seekers-vote-in-human-recruiter-v-ai-contest-and-its-not-even-close/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/roman-dias-pinto
• https://x.com/mercor_ai?lang=en
• https://www.youngmoney.co/p/forward-deployed-hedge-fund-analysts
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/07/09/mercor-fundraise/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-foody-2995ab10b/
• https://www.businessinsider.com/mercro-ditching-ai-embraces-old-school-big-tech-interviews-2-2026-7
• https://simplify.jobs/c/Mercor
• https://techstory.in/ai-startup-mercor-in-talks-to-double-valuation-to-20-billion-as-ai-training-revenue-hits-2-billion-run-rate/
• https://siliconvalleyinvestclub.com/companies/mercor/

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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