Surge
Bootstrapped human-data leader with a dedicated RL environments org
Surge AI is the largest human data / RLHF vendor by revenue ($1.2B+ in 2024) serving OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta, and has created an internal organization dedicated to RL environments. It builds expert-graded evals and environment products such as EnterpriseBench.
~$9.9M revenue per employee; CoreCraft benchmark
| Website | surgehq.ai |
|---|---|
| Domains | Multi-Domain, Data Labeling, RLHF |
| Location | San Francisco, New York, Seattle |
| Team size | 101-250 |
| Founded | 2020 |
| Funding | Bootstrapped; reported in talks to raise ~$1B at $25B+ valuation (2025) |
| Raising | Yes |
| Founders | Edwin Chen |
Similar startups
Also listed under Multi-Domain, Data Labeling, RLHF.
| Name | Domains | Location | Team | Funding | Raising |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| AfterQuery Expert human data and RL environments across code, finance, and computer use | Multi-Domain, Coding, Finance | San Francisco, New York, Seattle | 51-100 | $30.5M total (reported) | - |
| Anthromind Medical and long-horizon environments and expert data | Medical, Long Horizon, Data Labeling | San Francisco | 1-10 | - | - |
| 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 | - |