SAN FRANCISCO — Mercor has raised $750 million in a Series D round at a $20 billion valuation, the AI data company announced Tuesday in a press release distributed via Business Wire, money it plans to use in the business of testing and training AI agents for companies outside the frontier labs.
The new valuation has doubled the paper fortunes of the trio who founded the company. Forbes estimates CEO Brendan Foody, CTO Adarsh Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha are each worth $4.2 billion, based on stakes of around 21% apiece.
A year earlier the figures were about half that. In October 2025, Mercor raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation, and Forbes put the trio at $2.2 billion each. That round made them, at 22, the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. They have retained that title since then. The three surpassed Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, then aged 27, and even the mark set by Mark Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire at 23. Midha is the youngest member of the trio, by roughly two months. Mercor declined to comment on the Forbes estimates.
Purpose of the fresh funding
Mercor sells human expertise. Businesses make use of its network of professionals, like doctors and lawyers, to train AI models and verify whether they really can do a job.
With the fresh injection of capital, the company will focus on its evaluation and post-training work, it said. The process helps a firm determine the reliability and cost of an AI agent in completing a particular job, before letting it operate independently, without any supervision by a person.
“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,” Foody said. “We spent the last two years building that infrastructure with the frontier labs. Now we’re bringing it to enterprises across the economy.”
Hiremath made a similar point about why a public score is not enough. “Every company deploying AI needs to know whether it works, and the answer is different for each one,” he said. A model can score well on a public benchmark and still fail on the systems and edge cases that define how a specific business runs, he added.
Among the investors in the round are Benchmark, General Catalyst, Nvidia, Salesforce and Zoom, besides Felicis, Glade Brook Capital, Sapphire Ventures and others, according to the release. Jai Das of Sapphire Ventures said Mercor has developed something that is tough to duplicate — an expert network, and training and evaluation work shaped by several years of experience with the frontier labs.
Growth from $1 million to $3 billion in run rate
Foody described the growth in simple terms in a Tuesday post on X. Mercor went from $1 million to $3 billion in gross annualized revenue in just over two years, he wrote — $250 million of gross sales in its most recent month alone — and its customer count doubled compared with last year, rising to more than 100. The three founders met through high school debate and founded Mercor in 2023. It was initially a recruiting startup connecting freelance coders in India with U.S. companies, and later moved into data labeling, pairing experts with frontier labs including OpenAI.
Head count followed the revenue. Forbes reported the company has grown from fewer than 40 employees a year ago to roughly 300 this year, and that The Information reported in July that Mercor is profitable on a free cash flow basis and pays out 60% to 70% of its gross revenue to contractors.
A rapid rise, with some troubles
There have been bumps in the road, however. In April, Mercor said it was among thousands of companies hit by a hack linked to the open source project LiteLLM. Meta paused its work with the startup after that, Forbes reported, while OpenAI and other labs looked into whether their proprietary training data had been exposed.
Forbes also reported an embezzlement scandal at the company, in which an early manager on Mercor’s Anthropic account allegedly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses to his brother and father. Employees also suspected North Korean operatives had used stolen credentials to work for the company, multiple sources familiar with the matter told Forbes in April.
Despite having doubled, Mercor still trails its closest competitors in valuation. Scale AI was valued at around $29 billion in June 2025, as part of a deal under which Meta bought 49% of the company, and Forbes estimates Surge AI at about $24 billion. Scale cofounder Alex Wang, 29, was overtaken as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by Coplan in October 2025, about 20 days before the Mercor founders passed him. Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara, 30, is the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, according to Forbes.
Unlike Scale AI, Mercor does not appear to be for sale. “We’ve gotten a lot of acquisition interest, like I could walk away with billions of dollars in cash,” Foody said on a podcast in June. “The thing is that’s just not what motivates me.”