Mercor, an AI startup founded by 22-year-old college dropouts, raises $350M and hits $10B valuation in just two years

San Francisco–based AI startup Mercor is now valued at $10 billion after raising $350 million in a Series C round led by Felicis, with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures. The funding marks a fivefold increase in valuation since its previous raise earlier this year.

“We are now a $10 billion company. We have raised our $350 million Series C, led by @felicis with participation from @benchmark, @generalcatalyst, and @RobinhoodApp Ventures,” Mercor announced in a post on X.

Mercor’s story reads like a script from Silicon Valley’s golden era—three college dropouts building a billion-dollar company out of a single conference room. Founded in 2023 by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, the startup has gone from a dorm-room experiment to a multi-billion-dollar AI powerhouse in just two years.

From Dorm Rooms to $10B: AI Startup Mercor Raises $350M Series C Led by Felicis

The company started with a simple idea: use data to make smarter hiring decisions. What began as a service that analyzed interviews and resumes for clients has evolved into a global AI talent marketplace linking experts in science, law, and engineering with major labs like OpenAI and Meta. Today, more than 30,000 contractors earn an average of $85 per hour through the platform, collectively receiving over $1.5 million in payments every day.

The company’s growth was turbocharged by a pivotal industry shift last summer. When Meta bought a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.3 billion—effectively sidelining one of Mercor’s biggest competitors—many major labs began searching for a neutral data-labeling partner. Mercor quickly filled that gap. “It just doesn’t happen too often in startups where your biggest competitor gets torpedoed overnight,” cofounder Adarsh Hiremath told Forbes.

Now employing more than 300 people worldwide, Mercor says the new funding will be used to grow its expert network, improve its AI-matching systems, and speed up project delivery. The company’s proprietary model helps pair human expertise with training data, enabling AI systems to learn from human reasoning instead of raw text alone.

From a handful of students bootstrapping their way to seven-figure revenue to a company valued at $10 billion, Mercor’s rise shows how quickly the AI talent market is maturing—and how a small, hungry team can still outmaneuver giants.

We first covered Mercor in September 2024, when the then two-year-old startup raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Benchmark to rethink how companies discover and evaluate talent. Since then, its AI-driven interview tool has screened more than 400,000 candidates, marking a rapid shift from a niche experiment to a widely adopted hiring platform.

At its core, Mercor uses advanced algorithms to analyze profiles, conduct personalized interviews, and connect candidates with matching roles—reducing the bias and inefficiency that have long defined traditional hiring.