Mercor
Mercor trains AI models using domain experts and measures their economic value through its APEX platform, while also helping enterprises deploy custom AI agents and encode organizational knowledge. The company has raised $484M in funding and employs 201-500 people.
About
Mercor connects domain experts with AI model training, focusing on economically valuable applications. Its APEX platform evaluates model performance, and it offers enterprise services like custom AI agent deployment and knowledge encoding.
The company has rapidly scaled to 201-500 employees since its 2023 founding, supported by $484M in Series C funding from notable investors including Benchmark and DST Global.
Founders and leadership
Engineering is Mercor's largest function, making up 63% of its workforce. The company operates with a relatively flat structure, typical of fast-growing startups, with a median tenure of just one year.
The Mercor org chart
Brendan Foody (CEO, Co-Founder) leads 60 mapped leaders with 16 direct reports. Click +N to expand a team; names link to the person’s public profile.
Talent flow
Mercor recruits heavily from Amazon, Google, and Outlier, with 21, 15, and 15 hires respectively. Its alumni often move to micro1, Google, and Amazon, with 17, 14, and 12 departures to those companies.
Most common previous employers of Mercor staff: Amazon.com (21), Google (15), Outlier (15), Turing (12), Deloitte (11), Microsoft (9). Former Mercor employees most often moved to micro1 (17), Google (14), Amazon.com (12), Meta (7), Turing (6), Oracle (4).
Alumni worth knowing
The Mercor mafia
Mercor alumni have founded 37 companies, including Verita AI (66 staff), Research Commons (8 staff), and Northstar (8 staff), showing a strong entrepreneurial streak among former employees.
37Rithika K., was Exec Ops Team until 2025Shubhankit Singh, was Senior Software Engineer Expert until 2025Nikhil Srivastava, was Technical Researcher until 2025Raghav Krishnaswamy, was Member of Technical Staff until 2025Anatoly Chlenov PhD, was AI Model Trainer - Chemistry until 2025
Piper Cyterski, was Strategic Projects Lead until 2025
Niko Bonatsos, was Seed Investor until 2026
Nitesh Bandekar, was Marketing Strategist until 2024
Emma Feirstein, was Strategic Project Lead until 2026
Aryan Mishra, was GenAI until 2025
Samay Jain, was AI Data Analyst until 2025
Ahan Bhatia, was Investment Services Intelligence Analyst until 2025
Mick Johnson, was Contract Specialist until 2026
Kelvin Sardhara - Creative Communication Strategist, was Creative Script Writer until 2025
Suhas Palukuri, was UI/UX Designer until 2023
Yash Srivastava, was Software Engineer II until 2025
Charles Edmonds, was Video Captioning - Optimal Character Recognition (OCR) Expert until 2025
Andres Ventura, was Projects Engineer until 2025
Eric Hammond, was Generalist Expert until 2026
Ashwin Kodibagkar, was Data until 2026
Bhavya Bhushan, was Senior Software Engineer until 2025
Naivedyam Mishra, was LLM Training (Reinforcement Learning) until 2025
Rehan Rupawalla, was Account Leadership & Research until 2026
Olawale Ogunleye, was Senior Software Engineer until 2026
Jan Sahagun, was Voice Acting & Writing until 2025
Zachary Yu, was Engineering until 2025
Koustubh Lapate, was Technical / CS Professionals - Writer until 2026
Vaibhav Singh, was Design Cosultant until 2025
Osarenren Isorae, was Contract Software Engineer until 2026
Ian Mousley, was Senior Domain Expert until 2025
Carlos Ayon, was Writer Team Lead until 2026
Övünç Balcı, was Audio Editor Intelligence Analyst until 2025
Utkarsh Nagar, was Software Engineer until 2025
Zach Richards, was Frontier Data, Account Lead until 2026
Armaan Tipirneni, was Software Engineer until 2024
Oliver Brady, was Head of Engineering, Enterprise until 2026Hiring now
Web traffic
Traffic mix: 53% direct, 14% search, 14% social, 2% paid.
Where the team actually sits
Mercor people are concentrated in California, United States (61), United States (43), San Francisco Bay Area (31), England, United Kingdom (31).
Search footprint
Mercor attracts about 2,978 organic search visits a month, traffic worth roughly $13K a month if bought through ads. It gained 633 ranking keywords and lost 412 in the last period.
What employees say
- Compensation
- 4.40 / 5
- Career opportunities
- 4.00 / 5
- Senior management
- 4.00 / 5
- Work-life balance
- 4.40 / 5
Frequently asked
Mercor has raised $484M in total, most recently a Series C round in October 2025.
Mercor was founded in 2023 by Brendan Foody.
Brendan Foody (CEO, Co-Founder) sits at the top of Mercor's reporting structure, with 16 direct reports.
The most common previous employers of current Mercor staff are Amazon.com (21 people), Google (15 people), Outlier (15 people).
Former Mercor employees most often move to micro1 (17), Google (14), Amazon.com (12).
At least 37 companies have a founder who previously worked at Mercor, including Verita AI, Research Commons, Northstar.
Mercor attracts about 2,978 organic search visits a month, worth roughly $13K a month in equivalent ad spend.
Mercor staff are concentrated in California, United States (61), United States (43), San Francisco Bay Area (31).
Computed from 526 current and 882 former Mercor profiles, as of September 2026. Source: Crustdata.
Build this for any company
Every number on this page came from the Crustdata API. Point the MCP at a company and get the same org chart, alumni list and talent flow in one prompt.