(Mercor, San Francisco, California) An AI data labeling company founded in 2023 by high school friends Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha. Mercor provides data labeling and annotation for OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic. By 2027, the company had more than 400 employees.
Mercor has risen dramatically making the Forbes AI 50 list within two years. The company website states its revenue grew from nothing to $500 million in 17 months and crossed a billion in 2026. Mercor pays $4 million every day to more than 30,000 contractors, many of which have particular expertise in their disciplines. There is a waiting list of more than a million people who want to be hired at least part time. See
data labeling.
APEX
Mercor's AI Productivity Index (APEX) are benchmarks designed to evaluate frontier models and agents perform in the real world. For example, APEX-SWE (APEX SoftWare Engineering) evaluates software code and APEX-Accounting evaluates accounting workflows.