Mercor CEO & Co-Founder, Brendan Foody: How They Grew from $1M to $500M in 17 Months

Mercor CEO Brendan Foody explains how the company hit $500M ARR in 17 months by betting on high-caliber human data over crowdsourcing.

• Mercor grew from $1M to $500M ARR in 17 months, one month faster than Cursor’s record pace.
• Mercor pays data contributors $95/hour average vs. ~$30/hour at Scale AI and Surge, as a deliberate quality strategy.
• Mercor claims roughly 50–60% market share in RL environments, the data type labs are rapidly shifting spend toward.
• After Scale AI’s acquisition, Mercor quadrupled revenue; Foody says growth is still accelerating at $500M.
• At Series B, Felicis invested at ~100x revenue multiple on $20M ARR; Foody says the business is now highly profitable without needing to raise.
• Foody argues current AI evals (Olympiad math, PhD reasoning) are disconnected from real enterprise use cases and will be replaced by task-specific rubrics.
• Foody dismisses AGI in 3 years as the most wrong widely-held AI belief; models still can’t reliably draft emails or schedule meetings.
• Foody says Gemini Flash small models are the most underappreciated in the market; internally Mercor engineers favor Cursor, closely followed by Claude Code.

2025-09-15 · Watch on YouTube