Mercor, founded in 2023 by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, runs a marketplace that matches AI labs with vetted human experts, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and other domain specialists, who generate the labeled data, evaluations, and reinforcement-learning feedback that frontier model training depends on.
That expert-marketplace model set Mercor apart from earlier data-labeling vendors built around lower-skilled crowdwork: by recruiting from a pool of roughly 300,000 professionals and charging a 30% recruiting fee on top of expert pay, Mercor positioned itself to serve AI labs needing PhD-level or domain-licensed judgment rather than routine annotation, and that positioning drove a $350 million Series C at a $10 billion valuation.
Pricing runs through Mercor's recruiting fee model rather than a published subscription, scaling with the volume and specialization of expert labor a lab contracts. For an AI lab that needs human expertise, not only labeled examples, to train or evaluate a model in a specialized domain, Mercor's vetted expert marketplace addresses that directly.
