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Mercor Inc.
Mercor is a hiring platform that uses AI to interview people and then matches those people with companies that need experts to train and improve AI models.
Mercor is an AI hiring startup. It runs interviews with job candidates using AI, then matches the best people to companies that need them. A lot of its business today comes from a fast-growing, slightly unusual customer: AI labs that need thousands of highly educated experts — doctors, lawyers, engineers, economists — to write, grade, and correct the data that makes their models smarter.
The way it works is simple enough. A freelancer or job seeker signs up and does an AI-led interview online. Mercor's system watches how they answer, scores their skills, and builds a profile. Companies on the other side say what kind of expert they need, and Mercor serves up matching candidates. Mercor takes a cut of the money the worker gets paid. So it is a middleman, but a middleman with a twist: the interviewing and matching is largely automated, which lets it handle huge volumes of candidates quickly. That niche has turned into a big business. Demand for expert human data exploded as AI companies raced to improve their models, and Mercor rode that wave hard — its revenue reportedly rocketed from roughly $1 million to around $50 million annualized in about a year, and it raised money at a valuation that reached into the billions. The risk is obvious: much of this demand depends on AI labs continuing to pay up for human expertise. If that spending cools, or if rivals like Scale AI and a swarm of other data-labeling firms win the work, Mercor's growth could slow fast.
Mercor was started in 2023 by three young founders — Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha — who were teenagers when they launched it, and the company is now based in San Francisco. Its bet is that hiring and vetting people will increasingly be done by machines, and that the same AI boom creating demand for expert workers will also be the thing that lets Mercor find them cheaply and at scale.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026