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The 10 tactics behind Mercor's growth masterplan - fastest growing company in history

The Strategy Mercor Followed to Grow from $1M to $500M in 17 Months

Guillermo Flor's avatar
Guillermo Flor
Oct 29, 2025
∙ Paid

Mercor scaled from $1M to $500M in ARR in just 17 months, quadrupled after the Scale AI acquisition, and are now managing over $1 billion in active demand.


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Just one month after sharing that they were the fastest growing company on the planet, they’ve just announced their Series C at a $10B valuation (a 5x step-up from February) from Felicis, General Catalyst, Benchmark, and RobinHood Ventures, less than two years after launch.

🔥 In Today’s Newsletter, You’ll Learn the 10 Exact Tactics Mercor Used to Go From $1M to $500M in 17 Months:

1. Strategy:

  • How Mercor Anticipated the Platform Shift

  • How Mercor Started Narrow, Then Went Infinite

  • How Mercor Weaponized Competitors’ Shocks

2. Product:

  • How Mercor Productized Human Judgment

  • How Mercor Went Deep Vertically First

3. Growth:

  • How Mercor Turned Quality Into a Growth Loop

  • How Mercor Focused on the Power Users First

4. Moat:

  • How Mercor Built Distribution Through Dependency

  • How Mercor Turned Compliance Pain Into an Advantage

  • How Mercor Treated Fundraising as Product Strategy

Today, Mercor pays over $1.5 million per day to 30K+ experts on its marketplace: software engineers, doctors, bankers, lawyers, and researchers who are helping train the next generation of AI models.

They call it a new category of work: the AI labor economy, where human expertise fuels machine intelligence.

Series C Blog Post

Let’s dive into how a 22-year-old Thiel Fellow and dropout built the fastest-growing AI company on the planet.


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