Jan. 13 at 1:52 PM
$ABQQ Mercor: The AI Evaluation Powerhouse
Based on the search results, Mercor is not a content licensing platform like
ABQQD. Rather, it is something quite different but highly relevant to the AI
training ecosystem you've been discussing.
What Mercor Is
Mercor is an AI-powered talent marketplace and data evaluation platform
founded in 2023 by three 19-year-old college dropouts: Brendan Foody (CEO),
Adarsh Hiremath (CTO), and Surya Midha (board chairman). The company is
headquartered in San Francisco.[1][2][3]
Core Business Model
Mercor connects high-skill human experts (lawyers, doctors, engineers,
investment bankers, consultants, journalists) with leading AI labs and
enterprises to:
• Train frontier models through expert feedback and evaluation.
• Perform data labeling and annotation with professional judgment, not
low-wage workers.
• Create rubrics and evaluation frameworks for model assessment.
• Judge model outputs for quality and accuracy—a process called "AI
evals" or "evaluations."[4][5][3][1]
Unlike traditional data-labeling platforms that hire low-cost workers, Mercor
focuses on expert-level judgment and nuance—the kind of specialized
knowledge that LLMs currently lack.[5][4]
Key Clients
• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• Google DeepMind
• Meta
• Alphabet, Amazon, and other major tech companies[2][3][1]
The Numbers: Explosive Growth
Mercor's trajectory is extraordinary:
Metric Value
Founded January 2023
Initial revenue (8 months
in)
$1M annual run rate
Series B (Feb 2025)
$100M funding,
$2B valuation
Series C (Oct 2025)
$350M funding,
$10B valuation
Growth in 2025 Revenue up 4,658%
Monthly payouts to experts From
$2M/month →
$2M/day (as of
2025)
Active contractors 30,000+ domain experts
Users Grew to 3.4M (2025)
Interviews conducted
(2025)
1.5M interviews
Average contractor pay
$85–95 per hour[1][4][2][3]
The three founders became the youngest self-made billionaires in 2025 at
age 22, after Mercor raised
$350M at a
$10B valuation in October 2025.[1][2]
How Mercor Fits Into AI Training
The Model Training Pipeline
AI development involves several stages:
1. Pre-training: Ingesting massive amounts of unstructured text data (low
human-judgment component).
2. Post-training / Fine-tuning: Using human feedback to shape model
behavior, alignment, and accuracy.
3. Evaluation: Testing models to ensure they perform well on specific tasks.
Mercor's sweet spot is post-training and evaluation, where:
• Specialized expertise is critical.
• A lawyer's judgment of legal outputs is worth far more than a generic
labeler's rating.
• Doctors evaluating medical reasoning, engineers assessing code quality,
etc.[4][5]
The Value Proposition
Traditional data-labeling companies (like Scale AI) rely on volume and cost
efficiency. Mercor's differentiation is quality and expertise:
• By using domain experts (not generic workers), models receive feedback
on nuanced, high-stakes decisions.
• This accelerates model improvement in specialized domains (law,
medicine, finance).
• The platform uses AI to vet and match experts, ensuring quality at
scale.[3][5][4]
Mercor vs. ABQQD: Two Different Approaches
Aspect ABQQD Mercor
What they supply Creator-generated scripts
and content
Expert human
judgment and
evaluation
Content type Video scripts (100-
episode series)
Labeling, rubrics,
evaluation
assessments
Creator/Expert
compensation
$2/minute (licensing
revenue split)
$85–95/hour for
expert work
End use Training AI models on
diverse multimodal data
Post-training feedback
and model evaluation
Business model Content licensing
(Creator → Platform →
LLM buyers)
Managed services /
Expert-as-a-Service
Scale Aims to aggregate
millions of creator scripts
Currently 30,000+
active experts
Valuation ~
$4–5M
$10 billion (as of Oct
2025)
Why Mercor Is Relevant to Your Framework
Mercor demonstrates that:
1. AI companies are willing to pay for high-quality input, whether content
or expert judgment.
2. There is massive, growing demand for human expertise in the AI stack—
so much so that a 2.5-year-old company reached
$10B valuation.
3. The bottleneck in AI is not just compute, but quality data and human
judgment at scale.
4. Experts and specialized labor are now seen as strategic assets, with
companies paying
$85–95/hour for their time.
Connection to the "Creator Extraction" Argument
Just as Mercor proves that AI companies will pay well for expert evaluation,
ABQQD and similar platforms prove they will pay for creator-generated
content.
Together, they show:
• The AI training pipeline has multiple monetization layers.
• There is real, substantive economic value at every layer (content
generation, expert feedback, evaluation).
• Creators and experts are being systematically compensated for their
value via Mercor and ABQQD-like platforms.
• Meanwhile, big tech platforms extract this same labor (user-generated
content + implicit feedback from interactions) for zero direct payment.
The Broader Picture
Mercor's
$10B valuation at just 2.5 years old underscores the intensity of the
AI arms race:
• Companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic are racing to train the
best models.
• They need constant feedback loops: expert evaluations, rubric
refinement, alignment testing.
• They are willing to pay substantial sums for high-quality, reliable human
input.
This is the opposite of what YouTube and TikTok do—they extract human-
generated content and feedback (through algorithms and training) for zero
payment.
If expert evaluators earn
$85–95/hour (Mercor) and script creators earn
$2/minute (ABQQD), the implicit value of YouTube creators who supply both
content and implicit feedback (through watch patterns, engagement, etc.) is
vastly undercompensated.