Instead of signing expensive contracts with companies for their data, AI labs these days are trying a new tack: tapping former senior employees from those companies for their industry knowledge, Mercor CEO Brendan Foody said at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 on Tuesday.
Speaking on a panel onstage, Foody cast Mercor’s marketplace as one of the main channels connecting the former employees of investment banks, consulting houses and law firms with AI labs which are looking to automate those industries. Some of Mercor’s customers include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
“There is an argument that Goldman Sachs doesn’t love the idea of having models that are able to automate their value chain,” said Foody onstage, using the Wall Street giant as an example. “It definitely shifts the competitive dynamics, and that’s part of the reason that the labs need us. Their customers don’t want to give them data to automate large portions of their value chains, so they need to hire contractors who previously worked at those companies, understand those workflows, and are willing to train models to automate them.”
Foody, the 22-year-old co-founder of Mercor, says his startup pays industry experts up to $200 an hour to fill out forms and write reports for AI training. The company now has tens of thousands of contractors, and says it doles out more than $1.5 million to them every day. Still, Foody says the startup remains profitable because AI labs are willing to pay even more for that valuable data.
In just under three years since its inception, Mercor has increased its annualized recurring revenue to roughly $500 million, and recently raised funding at a $10 billion valuation.
Incumbents across the economy have good reason to be resistant to Merc …