APEX
An expert-authored benchmark of economically valuable tasks in finance, consulting, law, and medicine.
Expert marketplace powering evals and RL environments for frontier labs
Mercor connects AI labs with vetted domain experts for model training, evaluations, and RL environments across coding, healthcare, law, and other domains. Customers include OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, and it reached a ~$450M run rate in 2025. It has acquired RL-environment startups Sepal AI and Deeptune.
APEX benchmark; reported in talks (July 2026) to raise $500M at $20B valuation; founders became youngest self-made billionaires
| Website | mercor.com |
|---|---|
| Domains | Multi-Domain, Data Labeling, RLHF |
| Location | San Francisco |
| Team size | 250+ |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Funding | Series C, $350M at $10B valuation (Oct 2025) |
| Raising | Reported yes · re-verification required |
| Founders | Brendan Foody @BrendanFoody, Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha |
Focus areas and technical capabilities are shown separately. Missing technical evidence remains Unknown.
Products and services supported by official company materials. Reviewed 2026-08-16.
An expert-authored benchmark of economically valuable tasks in finance, consulting, law, and medicine.
Verified public artifacts and documented private commercial inventory.
An expert-authored benchmark of economically valuable tasks in finance, consulting, law, and medicine.
Company representatives and researchers can propose sourced changes. Submissions do not directly overwrite editorial data.
Also listed under Multi-Domain, Data Labeling, RLHF.
| Name | Domains | Type / catalog | Location | Team | Funding | Raising |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rise Data Labs RL environments and tasks across multiple domains, supported by a large expert network | Computer Use, Coding, Finance, Cybersecurity, Legal, Data Labeling, Enterprise, Multi-Domain, RLHF, Custom Environments | Data + environments 3 artifacts | New York, United States | 11-25 | - | Unknown |
| AfterQuery Expert human data and RL environments across code, finance, and computer use | Multi-Domain, Coding, Finance | Pure-play commercial 1 artifacts | San Francisco, New York, Seattle | 51-100 | $30.5M total (reported) | Unknown |
| Anthromind Medical and long-horizon environments and expert data | Medical, Long Horizon, Data Labeling | Data + environments Catalog unknown | San Francisco | 1-10 | - | Unknown |
| Artificial Analysis Independent benchmarking of AI models across intelligence, speed, and price | Multi-Domain, Machine Learning | Pure-play commercial Catalog unknown | San Francisco | 11-25 | $2.6M (2024) | Unknown |
| Datacurve Frontier coding data and repository RL environments via the Shipd bounty platform | Coding, RLHF | Data + environments Catalog unknown | San Francisco | 26-50 | Series A, $15M led by Chemistry (Oct 2025); $17.7M total | Unknown |
| Handshake Career network turned human-data and RL environments provider via Handshake AI | Multi-Domain, Data Labeling, RLHF | Data + environments 2 artifacts | San Francisco, New York, Bangalore, Berlin | 250+ | Series F, $200M (2022, ~$3.5B valuation) | Unknown |