Mercor Hits $10B Valuation with $350M AI Funding Round

AI companies are no longer chasing users. They’re chasing experts.

Mercor — once a small AI hiring platform — has just raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation, multiplying its worth fivefold in under a year. The reason? It cracked something every AI lab is struggling with: human expertise.

While most AI startups are racing to build smarter models, Mercor realized something deeper — AI is only as strong as the humans who teach it.
Instead of competing to build the next chatbot, it built the infrastructure for the people behind the models — scientists, lawyers, doctors, and specialists who train, verify, and refine what AI learns.

Now, OpenAI, DeepMind, and other top labs are turning to Mercor for one thing: domain intelligence — the nuanced feedback only humans can give.

Each expert on Mercor’s platform gets paid an average of $85 per hour, contributing to the $1.5 million it distributes daily. The company isn’t selling prompts or data — it’s selling judgment, something AI still can’t replicate.

What’s fascinating is how fast Mercor pivoted. It started as a basic hiring platform and ended up building a global AI training marketplace.
Now, with over 30,000 experts and new reinforcement learning systems that help models “learn from feedback,” it’s setting a new benchmark for what training AI responsibly actually looks like.

Investors are taking notice too.
Felicis Ventures, Benchmark, and General Catalyst — all big names in Silicon Valley — doubled down on this Series C round. Even Robinhood Ventures joined in. The result? Mercor’s valuation jumped from $2B to $10B in months.

The timing isn’t random.
When OpenAI and Google DeepMind reportedly cut ties with data-labeling firm Scale AI, the industry needed a new backbone for structured, human feedback. Mercor was right there — ready, scalable, and trusted.

The company claims it’s now on track to hit $500 million ARR faster than some of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing dev tool startups like Cursor. For context — Cursor hit that milestone within a year.

Mercor’s next move is clear:

• Expand its expert network globally.
• Build better systems for client-expert matching.
• Automate the boring parts of model training, while keeping human oversight at its core.

And maybe that’s the future — AI that’s taught, guided, and checked by real people instead of left to learn from noisy data.

Mercor’s rise is proof that human intelligence still sits at the top of the AI pyramid. Machines may predict patterns, but people still define purpose.

AI doesn’t replace expertise — it rewards it.
And for Mercor, that insight just turned into $350 million worth of belief.