Mercor
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 | Yes |
| Founders | Brendan Foody @BrendanFoody, Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha |
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| Rise Data Labs US-based expert human data and custom RL environments for enterprise AI | Computer Use, Coding, Finance, Cybersecurity, Legal, Data Labeling, Enterprise, Multi-Domain, RLHF, Custom Environments | United States | - | - | Yes |
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| Artificial Analysis Independent benchmarking of AI models across intelligence, speed, and price | Multi-Domain, Machine Learning | San Francisco | 11-25 | $2.6M (2024) | - |
| Besimple AI Human-in-the-loop annotation and evals, with a voice data focus | Data Labeling, Voice, RLHF | San Francisco | 1-10 | ~$3.5M total | - |
| Datacurve Frontier coding data and repository RL environments via the Shipd bounty platform | Coding, RLHF | San Francisco | 26-50 | Series A, $15M led by Chemistry (Oct 2025); $17.7M total | - |