Mercor

Mercor is an AI-driven platform that sources, assesses, hires, and pays specialized workers for tech companies and AI labs. Their automated AI‑interviewer tailors questions to a candidate’s résumé and experience, helping companies quickly identify top‑tier talent and filter out weaker candidates.

The Mercor platform’s current focus is on “human data” work—labeling, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and related high‑skill tasks essential to AI labs. Mercor differentiates itself by enabling direct collaboration between companies and contractors.

Mercor’s founding trio—CEO Brendan Foody, CTO Adarsh Hiremath, and COO Surya Midha—are college dropouts and triple Thiel Fellows who met through high school debate. Brendan and Adarsh built a cloud services consultancy together before pivoting into automated hiring. Surya manages operations and customer experience, leveraging a background in debate and a passion for removing friction in global staffing.

The team’s shared history in entrepreneurial ventures, plus their early alignment around solving specialized data‑labeling and hiring bottlenecks, underpins a culture of scrappy innovation and product focus. They’ve assembled a team of employees including engineers from Scale AI, Harvey, Ramp, Contextual AI, and Hebbia and also brought on leading AI researchers from Stanford and Harvard.