MercorThe company confirmed that the AI recruitment startup founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows has raised $100 million in the Series B..
Menlo Park-based Felicis led the tour to assess Mercour for $2 billion, eight times its previous valuation, previously the Wall Street Journal Report. Existing investor benchmarks, General Catalysts and DST Global also attended the meeting.
General Catalyst led the company’s $3.6 million seed round in 2023, while Benchmark supported its $32 million Series A A valuation in 2024.
This round brings the CEO Brendan FoodCTO Adarsh Hiremathand Chief Operating Officer Surya MidhaThis is some of the youngest founders of a billion-dollar startup. The two-year-old platform counts as Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey and Adam D’Angelo as supporters, he said the latest funding will Helps “accelerate its ability to match the call of billions of people and apply talent to its highest potential.”
Mercor was founded in 2023 to simplify hiring. Its platform automates resume screening, candidate matching, and provides AI-driven interviews and salary management. Employers upload job descriptions, Mercor’s system recommends the best candidates.
Mercor claims that its automation system not only simplifies recruitment, but also eliminates biases in the process. The claim claims that AI systems are less biased than humans Not always proven to be true. Still, tech companies such as OpenAI are already using Mercor’s automated tools, which the company claims can find better human candidates than other humans.
Job seekers completed 20 minutes of AI interviews to evaluate their skills and create profiles. The platform then matches them with relevant full-time, part-time or hourly roles.
“We collect performance data about candidates and use it to refine our predictions about who will perform best in the future,” Foody said.
Mercor initially focused on hiring software engineers and technical professionals in operations, content creation, product development and design. Software engineers remain the most important talent in Mercor today, Foody said. But AI labs are increasingly looking for other professionals – consultants, doctors, bankers, doctors and lawyers.
To meet the growing demand, Mercor expanded its talent pool and helped the HR team evaluate 468,000 applicants. India remains its largest source of talent, followed by the United States, while talent sources in Europe and South America are growing rapidly.
Income jumps as companies embrace flexible work
This momentum has prompted a sharp increase in Mercor’s revenue, which is generated by charging customers an hourly finder fee.
Last September, the startup grew at a 50% monthly rate with annual revenue running rate (by multiplying the latest monthly revenue by 120 million”. Maintaining that rate, it is now at $75 million in ARR, of which Most of it comes from AI labs. Mercor says it can now work with the world’s top five AI labs, including OpenAI.
Mercor’s $2 billion valuation gives it a 27x ARR multiple times, which is a reasonable number compared to the higher valuations seen today. Some investors are willing to pay up to 50 times the fastest-growing AI companies.
Another debate surrounding Mercor technology is the potential to accelerate work as AI evolves due to concerns about hiring bias.
However, the food argues that Mercor does not replace workers, but rather makes workers more valuable in most parts of the automated economy.
The CEO believes Mercor helps identify what humans should do in an AI-driven economy or what AI can’t perform, such as training AI models, managing complex decisions or filling creative and strategic roles.
“If AI automates 90% of the economy, then humanity will be the bottleneck for the remaining 10%. So, since the rest is automated, each economic output is 10 times leverage. ” Foody explained. “It means the way people work is changing because we are moving towards a more score-like, show-like working model.”
That’s why the founders believe that Mercor will remain relevant in the long run, as more companies prioritize expertise over tenure and hire experts on short-term projects rather than relying on full-time employees.
“I think that with smarter job matching, work becomes more effective,” he said. “Every project should be handled by the best, not just the people available to the employees.”
As for its own recruitment, Mercor’s average team age is 22 years old, recently hired a former head of Openai’s human data operations and was a previous head of growth.
