Mercor Raises $350M at $10B Valuation to Expand AI Training Platform and Build Recruiting Marketplace

Mercor, a company that connects AI labs with specialized domain experts to train foundational models, has raised $350 million in a Series C round, valuing the startup at $10 billion—quintupling its previous valuation. The round was led by Felicis Ventures, which also led Mercor’s earlier $100 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation. Existing investors Benchmark and General Catalyst, along with new participant Robinhood Ventures, also joined the funding round. TechCrunch reported in September that Mercor was in advanced talks to raise a Series C at a $10 billion valuation, surpassing its earlier target of $8 billion. At the time, the company said it already had multiple offers, signaling strong investor confidence. Originally launched as an AI-powered hiring platform, Mercor quickly pivoted to meet a growing demand in the AI industry: access to high-quality, expert human input for training models. The company now specializes in sourcing domain experts—such as doctors, scientists, and lawyers—who help train AI systems by providing nuanced feedback, labeling complex data, and guiding reinforcement learning processes. Mercor earns revenue through hourly finder’s fees and matching rates charged to AI labs that use its experts. The company has also been expanding its software infrastructure to support reinforcement learning workflows, where AI agents receive feedback on their decisions—either approval or correction—allowing models to refine their behavior over time. The shift in the AI data landscape has benefited Mercor. After Meta’s $14 billion investment in Scale AI and the subsequent departure of Scale’s CEO Alexandr Wang, several leading AI labs, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind, reportedly began distancing themselves from Scale. Mercor positioned itself as a strategic alternative, emphasizing its focus on expert-driven, high-quality training data. The company claims it’s on track to achieve $500 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) faster than Anysphere, the startup behind Cursor, which reached that milestone about a year after launching its core product. “Since we founded Mercor almost three years ago, AI has advanced at an astonishing pace. But it still struggles with the subtleties that drive economically valuable work—balancing trade-offs, understanding intent, developing taste, and deciding what should be done, not just what can be done,” Mercor wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. Mercor currently pays out more than $1.5 million per day to its network of over 30,000 experts, who are compensated at an average rate of over $85 per hour. Going forward, the company plans to focus on three key areas: expanding its global talent network, enhancing its matching algorithms to better pair experts with AI projects, and building automation tools to streamline its operations and scale efficiently.