Mercor

Mercor is a San Francisco AI data company that recruits domain experts (doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers) to train and evaluate frontier models for labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, publishes the APEX benchmarks that measure AI on real professional work, and now sells enterprise agent deployment. Founded in 2023 by three college dropouts, it reached a $10B valuation in October 2025 and a reported $2B gross revenue run rate by mid-2026, with a famously intense, in-person culture. Its interviews are distinctive: rapid-fire verbal technical screens, multi-hour hands-on onsites that test both unaided coding and AI-assisted building, and behavioral rounds laser-focused on ownership, speed and whether you can match the pace of its frontier-lab customers.