The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 114 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Mercor Burned Only $500K Post-Seed and Holds More Cash Than Raised
“The, we burnt a half a million dollars after our seed round. And then from there, we've pretty much been profitable ever since. We have more cash than we've ever raised.”
Frontier AI Task Automation Rose From 1% to 40% in 12 Months
“On Apex, the Frontier model right now is at about 40%, and 12 months ago the Frontier model was a one, which was scoring one percent.”
Mercor AI Agent Autonomously Managed an Entire Data Annotation Project
“Now we have an AI project manager that just completed its first project managing that entire thing end to end, where it's able to hire the experts. It's able to answer their questions. It's able to build the annotation tool using its coding tools within our pl…”
Foody: AI Labs Prefer Horizontal Data Vendors Over Niche Vertical Players
“We are finding that the labs tend to prefer partnering with a very horizontally capable vendor that is able to flex across all of the different Verticals and scale extremely quickly rather than working with a hundred different vendors that they have to train f…”
Felicis Offered Mercor $2B Valuation at $20M ARR
“We're at twenty million in revenue. They ask us, what valuation do we think makes most sense? And I say one to two billion dollars. So they give us a term sheet at a two billion dollar valuation.”
Lemkin: Most B2B Startups Will Suffer Worse Cybersecurity Breaches Than Mercor
“I genuinely think that most B to B companies are going to get hit worse than Merkur.”
Mercor is highly profitable and does not need additional external financing
“And so now we're 25 times larger in revenue scale than we were at the Series B but in a spot where the business is so profitable that we don't really need to go out for financing or spend too much time thinking about financing while we often get a lot of offer…”
Mercor never mandated 996 work hours for its employees
“Well, not exactly. I need to offer a key clarification, which is that we've actually never mandated hours. It was more so when we were talking about nine nine six, it was a description of how the early team worked. Like, in fact, the reason we talked about nin…”
Human data verifiers remain essential for expanding AI model capabilities
“So long as there's things that the human is able to do, the model's not able to do, and we want those capabilities in the model, whether it's to schedule a meeting or write emails for you or whatever it is, we need humans that help to create those verifiers an…”
AI model capabilities are not plateauing despite recent industry concerns
“I don't think that Models are plateauing. Like, if we look at the last 12 months of progress in models, I've been blown away.”
Mercor works with all top frontier AI research labs
“We work with All of the top research labs at the frontier of model capabilities, and we're not like the crowdsourcing companies in that we try to hide all the people on the platform, pay them low rates, et cetera.”
Benchmark offered Mercor a $250M valuation at a $2M run rate
“When we met Victor, we were at. 1.5 million dollars in revenue run rate. He gave us the term sheet and we were at a little over two million dollars in revenue run rate. So over a hundred X multiple on revenue.”
Mercor commands a 50% to 60% market share in RL environment data
“There's the new data types that everyone's moving towards called RL environments where we'll call it, rough estimate is like, 50 to 60% of the market, and so doing quite well on that and expanding market share quickly.”
Mercor has enough demand to double overnight if capacity allows
“We have the demand to, like, double overnight if we can meet capacity.”
Mercor will likely complete a low-dilution financing round soon
“I think that it's likely we'll do a financing soon to answer your question with low dilution, largely because there's a lot of benefits to signaling ourselves as the market leader and RL environments and all of the high complexity data that we produce.”
Jack Dorsey invested in Mercor and advised keeping the company private
“Like I remember when I was talking with Jack Dorsey before he invested, one piece of advice he gave me was that we should stay private as long as possible.”
Scale AI used Mercor's platform to hire thousands of workers
“Scale AI came to us and they used our platform to hire thousands of people.”
Mercor has positive growth in net margins unlike most AI startups
“Like, we have very positive growth in net margins, unlike most AI companies.”
Mercor is growing faster at $500M run rate than ever before
“In fact, the company is growing faster now at 500 than it's ever grown before, and so the growth continues accelerating.”
Mercor raised its Series B at a 100x revenue multiple
“When Felicis gave us the term sheet, we were at twenty million in revenue run rate. So it's a hundred X multiple on the revenue”
Hiremath: AI will only finish 60-80% of tasks, increasing human value
“But I think the more realistic breakdown is the AI for a specific use case might be able to get us 6070, 80% of the way there. But for that remaining 40, 30, 20%, you're going to need a human To be able to take you all the way there. And the reality of the sit…”
Hiremath: Mercor's client take rates exceed 30% for some accounts
“It's on a case by case basis. For some customers it can be, you know, over 30%. For some it can be less.”
Hiremath: Mercor raised $100M at a $2B valuation
“The round is a hundred million. It was at two billion.”
Nitski: Top AI models score 50% on Mercor's long-horizon benchmarks
“Well, in our Apex benchmarks, we're getting closer to around 50% of Long Horizon workflows. Top models are scoring around around that much.”
Nitski: Mercor's total headcount grew over 10x in the last year
“As the headcounts increased, you know, like more than 10 X in the last year, we just want to be careful not to grow one faster than the other.”
Nitski: Mercor should have restricted supported annotation workflows much sooner
“We made a tool that's maximally flexible, has all sorts of, we had, like, hundreds of different projects running on it. That's just chaos to manage, and what we needed to do sooner was to put guardrails on the type of services that we support, and work closer …”
Nitski: Physical and robotics data for AI will grow significantly
“I think that real world, like physical data is going to grow significantly over the next three years.”
Nitski: Every enterprise will eventually require human data work
“It's the direction we have been heading, which has reduced concentration, and it's the direction that we'll continue to head as every enterprise begins to have human data work for their proprietary use cases.”
Nitski: All core team attrition at Mercor is to found companies
“I'm proud that of the people I work closest with on my teams, I've only had attrition to founding. And we've had quite a bit of it.”
Mercor replaces take-home coding assignments with AI agent fluency tests
“We've moved away from take-home assignments. We do one take-home assignment, which is, like, can you just, like, use an agent to go, you're on your own for a bit of time, go use an agent, you know, give, produce this artifact for me, and we'll look at it.”
Foody: Mercor could raise prices 30% without impacting customer demand
“We maybe can't double prices. We could double capacity. We could probably increase prices by 30% without much of an impact.”
Foody: Mercor building benchmark to test AI cloning of SaaS apps
“We're building out an eval set that measures how effectively agents can build end-to-end SaaS applications, where twenty-twenty-five was the year of how do you get a model to make a PR and a code base, and twenty-twenty-six is the year of how do you get the mo…”
Foody: Unwritten human context is the key bottleneck to AI agent automation at Mercor
“When I try to get agents to do all of these workflows throughout Mercure, there's just an enormous amount of context that lives in people's heads that the agents need to have access to perform effectively.”
Foody: Mercor Has a Talent Network of Over Five Million People
“When we have this talent network of over five million people that are able to refer their friends, it's just so much easier for us to find the marginal doctor because we have that enormous talent network that can refer us to their friends.”
Foody: Data Quality Gives AI Data Vendors Strong Pricing Power
“And so it allows vendors that are extremely high quality to be super differentiated in so far as pricing power, because quality is the X factor that becomes dramatically more valuable than any other dimension.”
Foody: AI data training requires domain experts who are AI power users
“And it's more about people that actually are very acclimated to the frontier of AI, because it's the people that understand, that both have the expertise in oncology, but also are power users of ChatGPT or Claude that are able to find where the model makes mis…”
Treating marketplace talent well is critical for frontier AI development
“But actually if I had to choose the most important thing, it would be the internal link to quality, which is that having phenomenal people that you treat incredibly well is the most important thing in this market and getting those people to refer all of their …”
Mercor averaged 54% month-over-month revenue growth around its Series B
“We, we're growing over 50% month over month. Like we averaged 54% month over month growth for a while at that time period.”
Working hours and employee obsession decouple as startups scale
“I think the truth is that all along it's been much more about hiring people that like give a shit and love what they do and are obsessed with it and the way that we are rather than specific hours. And early on those were highly correlated, but I think that as …”
Hiremath: Mercor does not plan to immediately deploy $100M raise
“Our goal isn't to deploy a hundred million dollars tomorrow.”
Hiremath: You Can Teach Technical Skills, But You Can't Teach Care
“One realization that we've come to is that you can teach people a lot of things, whether it be, you know, technically or going to market or whatever, but The one thing that you can't quite teach people is to care, and that's one thing that we index on pretty h…”
Hiremath: Mercor reached eight-figure revenue before raising from Felicis
“It was doing, you know, eight figures in, in revenue, right?”
Hiremath: Mercor Did Not Intend to Do Any Stated Fundraising Rounds
“An interesting dynamic about of all of our, you know, fundraising rounds is just that, like, we didn't intend on, on doing the fundraising at the time, and it sort of just came to us.”
Mercor initially launched exclusively as a chatbot interface
“One of the initial iterations of the Mercore product was just built around a chat interface. Like there was pretty much no other way to hire people unless you use the Mercore chat bot, because we were so bullish on, on chat.”
Hiremath: Top 0.1% talent delivers exponential value, making customers price-insensitive
“There's a huge difference between the top .1% and then the 80th percentile person. So usually for customers, it's not a question of price. It's a question of quality.”
Mercor Builds Predictive Candidate Flywheel from End-to-End Job Performance Data
“The second network effect is or like data flywheel is around this job prediction piece where we're able to see who is performing well on jobs and the specific reasons why they're performing well on jobs and use that, that end to end Data on people's outcomes t…”