Mercor Hints at IPO as It Hits $10 Billion Valuation

Brendan Foody, CEO and cofounder of Mercor, has said an IPO is “potentially on the horizon,” his first public acknowledgment that the company could move beyond private fundraising. The remark comes as Mercor announced a $350 million Series C round that values the company at $10 billion. The financing was led by Felicis, with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures, and follows a $100 million Series B in February, also led by Felicis.

Mercor’s Early Pivot

Mercor was founded by three Thiel Fellows and began as a hiring startup, designed to assess candidates by analyzing résumés, interviews, and portfolios. In building that system, the company inadvertently amassed a network of specialized experts. That network became the foundation for recruiting highly skilled professionals to train AI systems.

This aligned with a growing need from AI labs for structured evaluation sets, reinforcement learning environments, and reliable human oversight. Today, Mercor manages more than 30,000 contractors who collectively earn over $1.5 million each day. Contractors are drawn from fields such as software engineering, finance, law, and medicine, with rates as high as $100 an hour. Work spans from lawyers tutoring legal AI systems to meme specialists helping xAI’s Grok capture internet culture.

Foody has described this as a new labor category. “Millions of people will spend the next decade teaching machines the judgment, nuance, and taste that only humans possess,” he wrote in a blog post. “Instead of doing predictable work repeatedly, they’ll teach agents how to do it once, so the agent can do it a million times.”