Mercor raises $750 million at a $20 billion valuation
The AMW Read
The $750 million round confirms a $20 billion valuation for an established data supplier, with implications for the economics of model training and evaluation.
Named counterparties: Salesforce
Mercor raises $750 million at a $20 billion valuation
Mercor has raised $750 million in a Series D round that values the company at $20 billion, twice its valuation a year earlier. Investors include Nvidia and Salesforce. The deal follows earlier reports that Nvidia was considering an investment at that valuation. Mercor said the round also included an employee tender, although it did not disclose how much of the transaction went to employee shares.
Mercor connects AI labs with doctors, lawyers, programmers, and other specialists who contribute training data, annotations, and model evaluations. Its financing highlights the value investors assign to the human expertise used to prepare and test AI systems. OpenAI is among its customers, according to the report. CEO Brendan Foody said Mercor has grown from $1 million to $3 billion in gross annualized revenue in just over two years, while its customer count has more than doubled to over 100. Annualized gross revenue reflects a recent sales pace; it is not the same as revenue earned over a full year or profit.
For investors and builders, the next question is how reliably an expert network can supply and assess specialized work as demand grows. Gross revenue alone does not show how much Mercor retains after paying contributors or what it earns in profit. The source also reports a cybersecurity incident that temporarily interrupted work with Meta and an employee-related funds allegation. Those events make customer retention, security controls, and the quality of expert work relevant measures alongside the headline valuation.
