Who's making the most money in AI? It's not who you think

"When he was 19 years old, Brendan Foody started Mercor with two of his high school friends as a way for his other friends, who also had startups, to hire software engineers overseas. It launched in 2023 as essentially a staffing agency, albeit a highly automated one. Language models reviewed resumes and did the interviewing. Within months, Mercor was bringing in $1 million in annualized revenue and turning a modest profit."

"Then, in early 2024, the company Scale AI approached Mercor with a big request: They needed 1,200 software engineers. At the time, Scale was one of the only well-known names in the historically back-of-house business of producing AI training data. It had grown to a valuation of nearly $14 billion by orchestrating hundreds of thousands of people around the world to label data for self-driving cars, e-commerce algorithms, and language-model-powered chatbots."

"When the engineers he recruited started complaining about missed pay (Scale has a reputation among data workers for chaotic platform management and is being sued in California over wage theft, among other infractions), Foody decided to cut out the middleman. In September, Foody announced that Mercor had reached $500 million annualized revenue, making it "the fastest growing company of all time." The previous titleholder was Anysphere, which makes the AI coding tool Cursor."

Brendan Foody founded Mercor at 19 to help startups hire overseas software engineers. Mercor launched in 2023 as a highly automated staffing agency where language models reviewed resumes and performed interviews. The company reached $1 million in annualized revenue within months and turned a modest profit. In early 2024 Scale AI requested 1,200 software engineers, revealing intense demand for specialized data labor. After recruited engineers reported missed pay and cited Scale’s chaotic platform management and legal issues, Foody bypassed the middleman. By September Mercor reported $500 million annualized revenue and claimed record growth.

Read at The Verge