Mercor, a company pioneering the intersection of 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 round values Mercor at $10 billion, a fivefold increase from its previous valuation, and marks one of the largest late-stage funding rounds in the emerging field of AI labor markets.
Founded nearly three years ago, Mercor is building a platform that connects human experts with leading AI labs and enterprises to train frontier AI models. By combining human judgment with machine intelligence, the company aims to unlock new forms of productivity and redefine how people contribute in an increasingly AI-driven economy.
Mercor’s talent network, composed of professionals from fields such as medicine, law, and finance, works directly with AI systems to refine how they reason, analyze, and make decisions. The company likens this process to a teacher mentoring a student: knowledge, nuance, and judgment are passed from humans to machines, enabling AI to understand better complex, real-world contexts that cannot be captured by code alone.
The new capital will accelerate Mercor’s growth across three key areas: expanding its global talent network, improving AI-to-human matching capabilities, and accelerating project delivery. These investments will help Mercor scale its unique model for integrating human expertise into AI development, an approach the company describes as “creating a new category of work.”
As industries evolve under the influence of AI, Mercor envisions millions of people transitioning from repetitive, predictable labor to higher-value work, training intelligent systems that, in turn, perform those tasks autonomously at scale. This shift, the company argues, will not diminish human potential but amplify it.
KEY QUOTES:
“Since we founded Mercor almost three years ago, AI has advanced at an astonishing pace. But it still struggles with the subtleties that drive economically valuable work—balancing trade-offs, understanding intent, developing taste, and deciding what should be done, not just what can be done. That’s where our work begins.”
“At Mercor, our vast talent network trains frontier AI models in the same way teachers train students: by sharing knowledge, experience, and context that can’t be captured in code alone. Each project expands what models understand. Each advance in AI, in turn, unlocks human potential.”
“Millions of people will spend the next decade teaching machines the judgment, nuance, and taste that only humans possess. Instead of doing predictable work repeatedly, they’ll teach agents how to do it once, so the agent can do it a million times.”
“We are uniquely positioned to create this new category of work and shape how human and artificial intelligence create more economic value.”
Brendan Foody, Co-Founder and CEO, Mercor
