Show notes
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 MonthsMolly 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 faster. More than 200,000 lawyers, 80% of the Am Law 100, and over 20% of the Fortune 500 build with Harvey. Visit: http://harvey.ai/ • Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com • Mercor—The human intelligence behind frontier AI. Frontier labs and leading enterprises use Mercor to turn the knowledge of 5M+ experts into the data, evals and benchmarks that make AI better at real work. Visit: http://mercor.com/sourcery • VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com • Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vcDisclosure: Paid Ad. Agents are an experimental AI tool. Its output may be inaccurate and is not investment advice. Public Holding’s, Inc. makes no guarantees about its accuracy or reliability—verify independently before use. Brokerage accounts and services provided by Open to the Public Investing, Inc. See additional disclosures at https://public.com/disclosures/agenticdisclosures.#podcast #investing #technology #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #siliconvalley
