Credit: Mercor Mercor, the San Francisco startup that pays experts to train and test AI models, has raised $750m in a Series D round that values it at $20bn. The valuation is double the $10bn Mercor reached when it raised $350m in October 2025. Benchmark, Felicis, Fundomo, General Catalyst, Nvidia, Salesforce, Sapphire Ventures and Zoom joined the round, Mercor said in a statement. So did funds managed by affiliates of Apollo, G Squared, Glade Brook Capital, StepStone Group and XTX Ventures.
The round also included an employee tender offer, co-founder Brendan Foody wrote in a blog post. Mercor did not say how much of the $750m went to the tender. TNW reported in July that Mercor was seeking a $20bn valuation as it agreed to buy Deeptune. From AI labs to every company Mercor started as an AI hiring platform.
It now runs a network of more than five million experts. They are paid to train and evaluate AI models with their professional knowledge. Its main buyers so far have been the frontier AI labs. The new money is meant to sell the same service to other companies. “Every job in the economy will need its own AI agents, and every company will need a way to train and evaluate them on its own work,” said Foody, who is co-CEO.
Mercor builds custom tests, known as evals, from each company’s real workflows. It then uses the results to post-train models on that company’s work, often starting from an open model. Deeptune, bought earlier this year, recreated hundreds of enterprise applications as practice environments for AI agents. “A model can score well on a public benchmark and still fail on the systems, policies, and edge cases that define how a specific business runs,” said Adarsh Hiremath, Mercor’s other co-founder and co-CEO. More on AI than on salaries Foody gave one figure from inside the company.
Mercor already spends three times as much on inference, the cost of running AI models, as it does on employee salaries, he wrote. If that ratio holds across the economy, he argued, it points to something close to double-digit GDP growth over the next five years. Mercor also opened offices in New York and London this year, according to the post. In August it was named backup buyer for the Spirit Airlines data that Google won in a bankruptcy auction.
A breach earlier this year In April, a breach at Mercor led Meta to freeze its AI data work with the company. Mercor published an update on the incident in June. Neither the statement nor Foody’s post mentions it. Get the TNW newsletter ✕ Close Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
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