AI recruitment unicorn Mercor completes Series C financing with a valuation of $10 billion dollars.

Artificial intelligence startup Mercor announced on Monday that it has completed a new round of Series C financing, with a valuation reaching 10 billion dollars, which is five times higher than its previous round of financing in February last year. The company stated in a blog post that it raised 350 million dollars in a round of financing led by Felicis. Felicis also led the company's Series B financing of 100 million dollars, with a valuation of 2 billion dollars, and other participants included Benchmark, General Catalyst, and new investor Robinhood Ventures. This new investment will be used in three key areas: expanding the company's talent network, improving the matching mechanism between experts and training opportunities, and increasing delivery speed. The company, founded by three Thiel Fellowship recipients, initially started as a recruiting company that made hiring decisions by analyzing interview records, resumes, and personal portfolio websites of candidates. After inadvertently building a network of professional experts, the startup began recruiting highly skilled professionals to train artificial intelligence models. The company wrote in a blog post that it currently pays over 1.5 million dollars a day to collaborating experts, with over 30,000 registered experts on its platform, earning an average of over 85 dollars per hour. They also aim to "teach agents to think more like humans by sharing knowledge, experience, and background information that cannot be captured by code alone." After Meta invested 14 billion dollars in data labeling startup Scale AI and hired its CEO, concerns arose about the neutrality of Scale AI, leading top AI labs like OpenAI and Google DeepMind to terminate their collaborations with Scale AI and Mercor to pick up more demand. Co-founder Adarsh Hiremath said, "This is not common in startups, as usually your biggest competitors don't get completely knocked down overnight." The startup still faces competition in the data labeling field, including Surge AI, which competes with Scale AI. Surge AI is reportedly planning a new round of financing with a target amount of 1 billion dollars. In March, Turing AI was valued at 2.2 billion dollars, and Invisible Technologies completed a 1 billion dollar financing round in September, pushing its valuation over 2 billion dollars.