Artificial intelligence startup Mercor on Monday announced a new Series C round that values the company at $10 billion, a fivefold increase from its previous funding in February.
The company said in a blog post that it raised $350 million in a round led by Felicis and also led a $100 million Series B round with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and new investors. robin hood Ventures.
This new investment will go into three focus areas: expanding the company’s talent network, advancing its system for matching experts with training opportunities, and providing faster delivery.
Founded by three Thiel Fellows, the company started out as a recruiting firm that evaluated candidates by analyzing interview transcripts, resumes, and personal portfolio websites to make hiring decisions.
After inadvertently amassing a network of experts, the startup pivoted to hiring highly skilled experts to train its AI models.
Mercor currently manages more than 30,000 contractors, who collectively receive more than $1.5 million in payments each day, and teaches agents to think more like humans by “sharing knowledge, experience, and context that code alone can’t capture,” the startup wrote in a blog post.
The company was able to take advantage of the pivot to data labeling. Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI in June. As part of the partnership, founder and then-CEO Alexander Wang stepped down to join the social media company.
Concerns over Scale AI’s neutrality following its investment in Meta reportedly triggered several large AI labs, including: google and OpenAI plan to terminate their partnership following this agreement.
“It doesn’t happen very often in startups that your biggest competitor gets torpedoed overnight,” co-founder Adarsh Hiremath told Forbes.
The company still faces competition in the data labeling space, including Scale AI rival Surge AI, which is reportedly seeking up to $1 billion in new funding, according to Reuters. Turing AI reached a valuation of $2.2 billion in March, and Invisible Technologies raised a new round of $100 million, pushing its valuation to over $2 billion in September.
