In a major recent development, Mercor has announced a USD 350 million Series C round, led by Felicis with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst and Robinhood Ventures—bringing the company’s valuation to approximately USD 10 billion. The firm—founded just three years ago—operates at the intersection of the AI economy and labour markets, connecting domain experts (doctors, lawyers, bankers) with leading AI labs to train models that capture judgement, nuance and intent. As companies look to scale their AI pipelines, the value of human insight—in training models, auditing outcomes and encoding high-level expert feedback—has become increasingly evident.

Mercor, the San Francisco–based startup bridging human expertise and artificial intelligence, announced a $350 million Series C funding round led by Felicis, with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures. The raise values the company at $10 billion, representing a fivefold jump from its Series B valuation, according to sources familiar with the deal.

A New Category of Work

Founded in 2022 by CEO Brendan Foody and CTO Alex Kovacs, Mercor has positioned itself at the intersection of labor markets and frontier AI research. The company’s platform connects a global network of domain experts — including doctors, lawyers, engineers, and financial analysts — with leading AI labs and enterprises to train models that require human judgment, context, and nuance.

Instead of performing repetitive tasks, these professionals “teach” AI systems once — helping them reason through complex real-world scenarios — so that machines can execute similar tasks millions of times. The model redefines knowledge work as “teaching the machine,” not competing with it.

“AI isn’t replacing people; it’s amplifying them,” Foody said in a company blog post. “Each advance in AI unlocks new human potential, and our experts are at the center of that process.”

Fueling the AI Economy

Mercor’s approach is rapidly attracting enterprise customers seeking scalable human-in-the-loop solutions for model training and evaluation. Its clients reportedly include several frontier AI research labs and Fortune 500 companies building agentic AI systems. The company’s experts contribute to projects ranging from early disease detection to financial modeling and legal reasoning.

With the new capital, Mercor plans to expand across three core areas: growing its expert network, improving matching algorithms between projects and talent, and accelerating delivery of AI training programs.

Investor Confidence in “Human + AI” Models

The Series C round cements Mercor as one of the fastest-growing players in the AI economy. Investors see the company as a key enabler of the next phase of automation — where human judgment is embedded in every AI workflow.

“Mercor is building the infrastructure for human-AI collaboration at scale,” said Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner at Felicis. “The ability to capture expert knowledge and feed it back into AI systems is going to be one of the most valuable layers of the AI stack.”

From Startup to Market Leader

The company’s valuation surge — from roughly $2 billion in early 2024 to $10 billion today — reflects a broader trend: investor capital is shifting toward firms that connect human skills with machine learning pipelines. Analysts say Mercor’s model mirrors the “agentic AI economy,” where professionals codify their judgment as evaluation data for training AI agents.

As Foody put it, “Millions of people will spend the next decade teaching machines the judgment, nuance, and taste that only humans possess.”

Mercor plans to use its Series C funding to expand globally and recruit more domain experts to its network. The company is currently hiring for engineering, data operations, and AI partnership roles via mercor.com/careers. With its latest round, Mercor joins the ranks of AI industry unicorns driving the shift from automation to augmentation — where human judgment remains the defining edge.