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

• Oct 2025fundraise
  Mercor closed a $350 million Series C round led by Felicis Ventures, with Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures participating. The round valued the company at $10 billion — five times its $2 billion Series B valuation from February 2025. cnbc.com
• Oct 2025press
  Forbes confirmed co-founders Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha each crossed the billion-dollar mark following the Series C close, making all three — then 22 years old — the youngest self-made billionaires in the world. geeksaroundglobe.com
• Sep 2025press
  Mercor reported a $450 million annualized revenue run rate and was on track to hit $500 million ARR within weeks, making it one of the fastest companies to reach that milestone. The company also posted $6 million in profit in the first half of 2025. rossclennett.com
• Feb 2025fundraise
  Mercor raised a $100 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation. rossclennett.com
• Mid-2025product
  Mercor announced a New York City office opening in July and began expanding to London, with a team led by Tareq Habash to build out European operations. linkedin.com
• May 2025product
  Mercor partnered with TrainLoop AI on research showing that knowledge-work agents perform better when rebuilt as coding agents. x.com
• 2025press
  Mercor appeared on the Forbes AI 50 list for the second consecutive year. linkedin.com
• 2025press
  A data breach attributed to the Lapsus$ group exposed approximately 4TB of Mercor data — including candidate profiles, PII, employer data, source code, API keys, video interviews, and customer data. The attack traced back to a supply-chain compromise through LiteLLM and a malicious version of the Trivy vulnerability scanner. youngmoney.co
• 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

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

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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