Mercor Raises $750M at $20B Valuation | CEO Brendan Foody
54 min
Mercor has raised $750 million in a Series D at a $20 billion valuation, with participation from Nvidia, Benchmark, General Catalyst, Funds managed by affiliates of Apollo, XTX Ventures, Salesforce, and others. Co-Founder & CEO Brendan Foody joins Sourcery to discuss how Mercor has grown more than 5X on a mid-nine-figure base, built a network of over 5 million experts, and scaled to more than $5 million in daily payouts to people helping train frontier AI models. Founded in 2023 by college dropouts, Mercor has evolved beyond AI-powered recruiting into building the data, evaluations, and reinforcement learning environments used to train AI systems on real professional work. Brendan explains why he believes every Fortune 500 company will eventually build its own AI intelligence, why human expertise becomes more valuable as AI improves, & how Mercor plans to expand from frontier labs into the broader enterprise economy. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Brendan Foody, Co-Founder & CEO Mercor (01:00) Mercor’s Path to a $1T Company (02:22) Mercor’s 3 Products (04:05) $5M a Day in Expert Payouts on Stripe Connect (05:40) Why Mercor Is Not a Marketplace (08:51) Is Human Data a Durable Category (12:20) How Mercor Finds and Evaluates Experts (15:45) Holding Category Leadership With a Founding Team in Their Early 20s (18:00) Chips on the Shoulder and Avoiding Mimetic Competition (28:25) Why Mercor Acquired Deeptune (31:22) Turning Down Acquisition Offers (34:40) Harvey, LAB and Why the Model Is the Product (41:30) Why Data Is Mispriced in the AI Stack (43:40) Every Fortune 500 Becomes a Neolab (49:55) IPO Timeline and the Next 12 Months Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOSheaBrendan on X: https://x.com/BrendanFoody𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Harvey—The AI platform built for legal work, is helping the best firms and companies close deals f...