Founded by three former school friends, Mercor is building the human expertise infrastructure used to train, evaluate and improve advanced AI models.
Mercor announced a $750 million Series D on November 10, valuing the San Francisco AI startup at $20 billion, twice its valuation from approximately one year earlier.
The financing involved investors including Benchmark, Felicis, Fundomo, NVIDIA, General Catalyst, Salesforce, Sapphire Ventures, Zoom and investment funds affiliated with Apollo. The transaction also included an employee tender.
Founded in 2023 by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, Mercor originally developed AI-powered recruiting technology before expanding into specialized human expertise for AI development.
From Recruiting to Training AI Agents
Mercor connects AI laboratories and enterprises with professionals whose knowledge can improve models.
Its network includes specialists in medicine, law, finance, engineering and other disciplines. These experts help evaluate model outputs, develop training tasks and determine whether AI systems can reliably perform professional work.
The company reports a network exceeding five million experts.
Mercor is now moving beyond model training into enterprise-specific evaluations and post-training infrastructure.
Earlier in 2026, it acquired Deeptune, whose technology recreates enterprise software environments where AI agents can practice real workflows.
The Bigger Business Opportunity
As AI agents become capable of performing complex professional tasks, companies will need ways to evaluate accuracy, reliability and compliance with internal procedures.
Mercor wants to provide that infrastructure.
The central challenge is that human expertise remains expensive to organize and evaluate, while AI laboratories face increasing pressure to reduce training costs.
The $20 billion valuation represents a bet that supplying human intelligence to AI companies can become a lasting industry rather than a temporary stage in model development.
Founders: Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha. Investors: Benchmark, Felicis, NVIDIA, General Catalyst and others.