Mercor

Mercor’s three co-founders, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, all attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, a high school in San Jose, California, where they were debate teammates. After graduating in 2021, Foody and Midha enrolled at Georgetown University, while Hiremath went to Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

The three began the company as college freshmen and started building it full-time in 2023 after dropping out.⁠[2]

Mercor was founded in January 2023 by Foody, Hiremath and Midha. Its initial product manually matched skilled developers in India with US startups via WhatsApp and Google Sheets.⁠[3][1]

By mid-2023 the founders realized these manual processes could not scale and built an internal AI interviewer tool.⁠[1]

Hiremath was named to the 20-member 2024 Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry class for his work on Mercor, then described as using AI to streamline and automate job recruiting for applicants and companies. Hiremath said he left Harvard after completing his sophomore year and was on an indefinite leave of absence.⁠[3]

Hiremath said at the time that Mercor had raised more than $3.6 million from General CatalystGeneral CatalystGeneral Catalyst (GC) is an investment firm founded in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, United States, created by Joel Cutler, David Fialkow and Bill Fitzgerald, that backs companies from the seed stage through growth.Open the full entry and other investors.⁠[3]

On September 19, 2024, Mercor announced a $30 million Series A at a valuation the company put at about $250 million. The round was led by Victor Lazarte and Bill GurleyBill GurleyBill Gurley is a venture investor, author and podcast host who spent many years as a Benchmark general partner, investing in and serving on boards of technology businesses including Uber and Zillow. He moved from computer engineering to securities research and became known for internet marketplace investments, the Above the Crowd blog and the career book Runnin’ Down a Dream.Open the full entry of Benchmark, with Lazarte joining Mercor’s board; General Catalyst, Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry and Jack Dorsey were among the other investors.⁠[2]

At the time Mercor described itself as an AI-powered hiring platform based in San Francisco. Foody said the company aimed to give every applicant an interview, arguing that the existing hiring process selected candidates based on traditional résumé signals rather than human ability.⁠[2]

As frontier labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google needed domain experts for model post-training, including reinforcement learning from human feedback, Mercor’s expert network became a source of talent for them, and the company’s focus shifted from recruiting matches to supplying expert data for AI model training and evaluation.⁠[1]

In February 2025 Mercor raised a $100 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation, led by Felicis with participation from General Catalyst, DST GlobalDST GlobalDST Global is a technology investment firm founded by Yuri Milner in 2009 that focuses on growth-stage investments in internet companies worldwide; it has invested in companies including Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Airbnb and Spotify, and in 2026 led the US$400 million Series B round of the AI visual content company Higgsfield.Open the full entry, Benchmark and Menlo Ventures. The company said at the time that it was profitable.⁠[4][5]

By February 2025 Mercor had reached $75 million in annual recurring revenue.⁠[1]

On September 3, 2025, Scale AI sued Mercor and its former employee Eugene Ling in San Francisco federal court, bringing a trade-secret misappropriation claim against Mercor and a breach-of-contract claim against Ling. Scale AI alleged that Ling downloaded more than 100 confidential documents, including customer strategies, to a personal Google Drive and pitched Mercor to one of Scale’s largest customers while still employed there.⁠[6][7]

Mercor co-founder Surya Midha denied that the company had used any Scale data, saying Mercor had “no interest” in Scale’s trade secrets; he said Ling had reported having old documents in a personal drive, which Mercor had never accessed and was investigating, and that Mercor had offered to have Ling destroy the files or reach another resolution.⁠[6]

In September 2025 Mercor’s annualized run-rate revenue was approaching $450 million, and it was in discussions with investors about a Series C round. Foody said ARR was higher than that figure and explained that the company’s revenue includes the total amount customers pay Mercor for services.⁠[8]

Mercor said it supplied data-labeling contractors to five top AI labs, including Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, with OpenAI and Nvidia also among its customers, and a subset of customers including OpenAI accounted for an outsized share of revenue. At the time Foody was chief executive, Hiremath chief technology officer and Midha chief operating officer.⁠[8]

On October 1, 2025, Mercor released the AI Productivity Index (APEX), which measures whether AI can perform knowledge work of high economic value in law, medicine, finance and management consulting. Mercor spent more than $500,000 developing 200 tasks, with a former global managing director of McKinseyMcKinsey & CompanyMcKinsey & Company is a management consulting firm headquartered in New York, United States. It was founded in Chicago in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey and, after Marvin Bower established its “professional service” principles, grew into one of the largest pure consulting firms in the world; as of October 2026 it has more than 100 offices in over 50 countries and about 40,000 employees. It has also repeatedly faced regulatory investigations and public criticism over episodes such as its work with Enron, a former leader’s insider trading case, and its consulting for opioid manufacturers.Open the full entry, a former dean of Harvard Business School and a Harvard Law School professor among the contributors. In the first results GPT-5 scored highest, at 64.2%.⁠[9]

At the time Mercor’s contracted experts earned an average of $81 per hour, and senior domain experts with at least four years of experience could earn more than $200 per hour.⁠[9]

On October 27, 2025, Mercor confirmed it had raised $350 million in a Series C at a $10 billion valuation, five times the $2 billion valuation of its Series B. Felicis led the round, Benchmark and General Catalyst participated again, and Robinhood Ventures joined as a new investor.⁠[10][5]

The company said it was paying more than $1.5 million a day to its contractors and had more than 30,000 experts on its roster earning over $85 an hour on average. At the time of the Series C, Mercor’s annual recurring revenue was $450 million.⁠[10][1]

In February 2026 Mercor reached $1 billion in annualized revenue.⁠[11]

On March 3, 2026, Foody wrote on the company blog that Mercor had built a network of more than 4 million vetted experts and over 1.9 million referrals, and had grown from paying out nothing to more than $2 million a day within two years.⁠[12]

In late March 2026 Mercor was affected by a third-party supply-chain attack involving the open-source tool LiteLLM, in which an attacker published compromised versions of LiteLLM designed to steal credentials from systems that installed them. Mercor said it was one of thousands of companies affected, that its security team had promptly contained and remediated the incident, and that it was investigating with third-party forensics experts.⁠[13][14]

MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry reportedly paused its work with Mercor afterward and was investigating the incident.⁠[14]

In April 2026 breach-related class actions were filed against Mercor: by mid-April there were at least four, alleging breach of privacy, breach of implied contract, negligence, unjust enrichment and violations of California’s Unfair Competition Law. By late April Mercor had been served with at least seven class-action suits.⁠[15][16]

Plaintiffs alleged that the exposed data included job-interview recordings, facial biometric data and computer screenshots, and that Mercor monitored contractors’ computers, shared that data with clients and used interview recordings to train AI models. Mercor said it strongly disputed the “speculative” claims.⁠[16]

On June 25, 2026, Mercor published an update on the incident, saying it had engaged outside forensics specialists including Google’s Mandiant and was working with law enforcement; only a very limited subset of experts had sensitive information affected, there was no evidence the data had been misused, the impact on customer information was very limited, and no employee data was affected. The company said it would notify affected experts on June 25 and 26.⁠[13]

Remediation measures Mercor listed included auditing all third-party dependencies, regularly rotating credentials and access keys across cloud platforms, GitHub and SaaS systems, implementing 24/7 managed detection and response, and ongoing penetration testing by independent researchers.⁠[13]

Mercor’s annualized revenue crossed $2 billion in June 2026. Foody said the figure had doubled from four months earlier.⁠[11][17]

In July 2026 Mercor was in talks to raise $500 million at a $20 billion valuation and had told investors it had received a term sheet at that valuation; the deal was expected to close later in July, though terms could change. At the time Foody and Hiremath were co-CEOs and Midha was chairman of the board.⁠[11][17]

On July 9, 2026, Mercor announced it would acquire Deeptune, a company building environments for reinforcement learning, without disclosing terms. Deeptune had recreated hundreds of enterprise applications as the software layer of such environments, and Mercor was already a customer; Deeptune’s founder and CEO and its entire team were to join Mercor as it expanded its New York team. Foody said Mercor’s network of more than five million domain experts creates tasks and verifiers for frontier model training.⁠[18]

On October 8, 2026, Mercor announced Mercor Research, whose agenda spans AI evaluation, model training, economics and labor, and described its approach of working with domain experts, post-training models and measuring them again.⁠[19]

As of October 2026, Mercor’s website said its platform had more than 5 million experts, including physicians, lawyers, engineers and consultants, with an average contracted rate of $101 per hour and more than $4 million in daily payouts. Foody was named to the 2026 TIME100 AI list.⁠[20][21]

Mercor: Official website: https://www.mercor.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

X: Official account: https://x.com/mercor (opens in a new window)⁠[19][20]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Official account: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mercor-ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Official account: https://www.youtube.com/@mercor-ai (opens in a new window)⁠[19]