Mercor, an AI data company that helps businesses train and evaluate artificial intelligence models using human expertise, has raised $750 million in a Series D funding round at a $20 billion valuation.
Announced on November 10, the round doubles the company’s valuation from $10 billion in its previous $350 million Series C in October 2025.
The funding attracted participation from Benchmark, Felicis, Fundomo, funds managed by affiliates of Apollo, G Squared, General Catalyst, Glade Brook Capital, NVIDIA, Salesforce, Sapphire Ventures, StepStone Group, XTX Ventures and Zoom. Mercor did not disclose the lead investor. The round also included an employee tender offer, according to the company’s announcement.
Mercor Uses Human Expertise to Train and Evaluate AI
Founded in 2023, Mercor connects AI companies and enterprises with a network of more than five million experts. The network helps frontier AI laboratories, technology companies, AI startups and Fortune 500 businesses evaluate and improve AI models using real professional knowledge and work.
As AI agents take on more complex tasks, companies need ways to measure how reliably these systems perform and how much it costs to complete a task. Mercor’s evaluation and post-training services help businesses assess AI performance and establish standards for completing professional workflows.
The company plans to use its latest funding to expand its evaluation and post-training business, invest in research and build infrastructure for training AI agents. This includes realistic digital environments where agents can learn and practise complex professional tasks.
APEX Benchmarks and Enterprise AI Training
Mercor operates APEX, a public benchmark series designed to measure how well AI systems perform economically valuable professional work.
The company also develops custom benchmarks for individual enterprises. These benchmarks assess AI models against each company’s specific requirements and standards, providing a foundation for further model training.
Mercor has also expanded its capabilities through the acquisition of Deeptune. The company’s team spent two years recreating hundreds of enterprise applications as training environments. These environments help AI agents learn how work is performed inside specific business software systems.
Sapphire Ventures, an investor in the funding round, highlighted the growing demand for expert-driven AI training. While frontier AI labs have been major buyers of this data, the firm expects more enterprises to evaluate and train AI agents using their own business workflows as open AI models become more capable.
Founders and Growing Competition in AI Data
Mercor was founded in 2023 by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha. Foody and Hiremath serve as co-CEOs. All three founders are Thiel Fellows and left college to build the company.
Mercor is operating in an increasingly competitive AI data and model-training market. Several companies have attracted significant investment as demand grows for high-quality training data, model evaluation and post-training infrastructure.
Recent funding and valuation developments across the sector include Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI in June 2025, Micro1’s reported $4 billion valuation in September 2026, Snorkel AI’s $350 million Series E in September 2026, and Labelbox’s $100 million-plus Series E in October 2026. Post-training platform Trajectory also raised a $45 million Series A in November 2026.
Mercor’s latest $750 million round reflects investor interest in the infrastructure needed to make AI systems more reliable and capable of handling real-world professional work.
