Mercor went from $1M to $3B in run rate in 27 months.
On Tuesday it raised $750M at a $20B valuation, double the price of a year ago:
5 million experts in its network, paid more than $5M a day
$500K burned in its entire life, profitable ever since
zero salespeople for most of its growth
three founders aged 23, the youngest self-made billionaires in the world (according to Forbes)
What they do? An AI model improves when something tells it where it went wrong. In maths a calculator can check the answer. No tool can automatically check a banker's financial model or a lawyer's memo.
Mercor finds the bankers, lawyers and doctors, pays them to write real tasks and the rubrics that grade them, and sells those tests and practice environments to OpenAI and the other labs. Now it sells the same thing to the Fortune 500.
→ Mercor gets paid for every task that makes a model better at a real job.
📚 In this newsletter, I break down every phase from a college dev shop to $3B, with clips from the founders' own words and the takeaways for founders.
Inside you will find:
How to Get to $1M Before You Find Your Market
A dev shop, engineers hired in India, the first AI interviewer and seed customers that kept dying.How to Spot the Shift Before the Market Leader Does
See how Scale AI hired thousands through Mercor and showed them where the market was going.How to Grow 50% a Month With Zero Salespeople
Inbound only, 70% referrals, $95 an hour against the market's $30 and 300 hires in two days.How to Raise at 100x Revenue Without a Deck
A term sheet in 36 hours, a helicopter, a Ferrari race in Las Vegas and how Foody prices a round.How to Turn a Competitor's Exit Into 4x Growth
What happened when Meta bought into Scale AI, and why Mercor was ready for it.How to Go From Marketplace to Full-Stack Data Company
Apps, worlds and tasks, an AI project manager and a payments system moving $5M a day.How to Survive a Breach and Add $300M ARR in 60 Days
The Saturday of the hack, the all-hands, the seventh company value and the customer that paused.How to Sell the Lab Playbook to Every Fortune 500
Deeptune, inference bills above salaries and the spend levels where companies start buying evals.The Team Behind Mercor
Three debate partners, a donut stand, six-day weeks and the offers they turned down.
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1. How to Get to $1M Before You Find Your Market
Mercor started as a dev shop.