Mercor
Funding History
| Series A · 09/2024 | $250M |
|---|---|
| Series B · 02/2025 | $2.0B |
| Series C · 10/2025 | $10.0B |
About
Mercor was founded in 2023 by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, three Bay Area high school friends who built a platform for sourcing vetted human experts to train, evaluate and provide feedback data to frontier AI models for clients that include leading AI labs. Foody is chief executive, Hiremath is chief technology officer, and Midha became chairman in October 2025 after previously serving as chief operating officer; Sundeep Jain, formerly Uber's chief product officer, joined as president in May 2025.
- CEO
- Brendan Foody
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California
- Founded
- 2023
- Website
- mercor.com
Overview
Mercor is a San Francisco-based company that connects vetted expert contractors -- engineers, lawyers, doctors, bankers and journalists among them -- with AI labs and technology companies that need human-generated data, evaluation and reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback work to train frontier AI models. It was founded in 2023 by three Bay Area high school friends, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, who met on the Bellarmine College Preparatory speech and debate team; Foody serves as chief executive and Hiremath as chief technology officer, while Midha moved from chief operating officer to company chairman in October 2025.
Sundeep Jain, formerly Uber's chief product officer, joined as Mercor's first president in May 2025. Mercor's revenue grew unusually fast: the company said its annualized revenue run rate crossed $2 billion by July 2026, roughly double the figure from four months earlier.
Mercor raised a $30 million Series A at a $250 million valuation in September 2024, a $100 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation in February 2025, and a $350 million Series C at a $10 billion valuation in October 2025 led by Felicis with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst and Robinhood Ventures. The October 2025 round made Foody, Hiremath and Midha, all 22 at the time, among the world's youngest self-made billionaires.
In late March 2026, Mercor disclosed it had been hit by a supply-chain cyberattack tied to a compromise of the open-source LiteLLM project, which attackers said exposed roughly 4 terabytes of data including contractor personal information, interview video and source code; Meta paused work with the company afterward and several contractor lawsuits followed.
By mid-2026 Mercor was in discussions to raise roughly $500 million in a new round that would value the company at about $20 billion, with existing investor General Catalyst reported to be discussing leading the round and Nvidia reported to be weighing a stake; as of the most recent reporting in August 2026 that round had not been finalized.
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