Investing in Mercor

If you could teleport back to the start of the internet age and tell someone, “In the future, people will find their romantic partners online, and an algorithm will curate who they can meet.” Would they believe you? 

Now, imagine someone from 2045 teleporting to you today at the start of the AI age saying, “In the future, people will find their jobs online, and an AI will curate which jobs are best for them.” Seems like a smaller mental leap than dating, right?

The truth is labor markets are ridiculously inefficient. In 2017 Forbes estimated that $200B is spent annually on recruiters and staffing services. People hiring people. It’s become common practice to look for mental shortcuts like where you went to college or which company you worked for to determine how much of a fit you are for a prospective job. But if you’ve ever worked at a company with an excellent hiring culture, you know these shortcuts don’t tell the whole story. In today’s recruiting paradigm, incredible talent is systematically overlooked. 

Owing to LLMs, the global workforce is undergoing a tectonic shift. The discovery mechanism for labor is not immune to this shift. We can now interview candidates for pennies, scale it infinitely, and create a more fair and fluid labor marketplace. This is the north star for Mercor. Give the overlooked a fair shot at meaningful work with AI. Today, we’re honored to announce that we are leading Mercor’s Series B. 

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Mercor co-founders Brendan, Adarsh, and Surya have been working together since age 14. In high school, they were on the first debate team in history to win all three national tournaments in the same year: TOC, NSDA, and NDCA. Brendan started a company in his teens that grew to $100K+ in revenue. In 2023, all three received a Thiel Fellowship. They dropped out of college to start Mercor.

When we look for outlier companies, after the talent of the founding team, we look for nested S-curves that show how product innovations will feed into subsequent ones, unlocking new areas for growth. Mercor is already two curves deep in their master plan. 

Their first breakthrough was finding and matching human experts with the large AI labs. We’ve gone from GPUs being scarce and data being plentiful to the exact opposite. It’s because we’ve used up all of the public data on the web. Everything else that is valuable is locked up inside human minds. If AI models have to scale to economically valuable work and their chain-of-thought mirrors that of humans, you need to first train these models on expert human data. 

The next decade of AI improvements = GPUs + algorithms + expert human data. Nvidia and researchers solve the first two, and Mercor takes care of the last piece.

Mercor is the fastest, most reliable way for AI labs to access high-quality human data; the results speak for themselves. For the past year, they’ve averaged 41% month-over-month growth to an eight-figure run rate, onboarded nearly all top AI labs and hyperscalers as customers, and helped create thousands of jobs along the way. This is just the beginning. 

The Mercor team shares a common belief that global labor inefficiency is due to a matching problem: a given candidate applies to only a dozen jobs, and a given company considers only a fraction of a percent of people in the market. The bottleneck here is humans. Now that Mercor can solve the matching problem "at the cost of software," it makes way for a global, unified labor market that everyone will interview with and companies will hire from.

Mercor’s second S-curve in AI recruiting is underway right now. By refining their models with each hire, Mercor gets better at identifying and recruiting high-performing talent over time. Their models are already better than most technical recruiters. The long-term vision is a universal aggregator that places millions of people at their ideal jobs. It puts Mercor in a great position to reinvent the $200B US staffing and recruiting industry.

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Only truly special companies can string these cycles together and develop increasing product devotion. We’ve seen this firsthand in companies like Shopify and Canva, and we believe we’re seeing another one here with Mercor.  

If you’re excited about this mission, Mercor is hiring. They’ve come all this way with just 30 people, and they’re profitable, in SF, with an intense can-do culture.