Brendan Foody

3 years ago today, Adarsh H., Surya Midha, and I were 19 years old and started Mercor at a hackathon in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Since then, Mercor has become the fastest growing company of all time (by revenue). At the time, all we had was deep conviction in the extraordinary people on our platform, as we embarked on our mission to create opportunities for them. We started doing things that didn’t scale: I persuaded our friends to hire from us, Surya manually interviewed engineers from the IITs, and Adarsh built the product to automate the hiring process. Within 8 months, we scaled Mercor to a $1M revenue run rate and dropped out of college. Shortly after, we started speaking with the top AI labs, realizing we’d found our ideal customer. Mercor is now paying $2M / day to experts on our platform, with an average pay rate of $95 / hour. We work with all of the top AI labs, hyperscalers, and application layer companies. While so much has changed in the last 3 years, our focus on creating opportunities for exceptional people has remained consistent. Defining what work will look like in the AI economy is the most impactful problem we can work on. At a time when everyone is worried about job displacement, we’re the fastest growing creator of jobs in the world. I couldn’t be more proud of the team and everything they have accomplished.

We’ve raised our $350M Series C at a $10B valuation from Felicis, General Catalyst, and Benchmark Just 2 years after starting, Mercor is paying $1.5 million per day to experts in our marketplace. We’re creating a new category of work in the AI economy, where software engineers, bankers, lawyers, and other professionals earn based on their experience while advancing the frontier of AI. While most new categories take time to build momentum, we’ve broken every growth record. For comparison, in their first 2 years: - Uber paid out just over a $1 million to drivers - Airbnb paid out $10 million to hosts We are unlocking human potential in the AI economy.

AI being smart isn’t the same as it being useful for real work. AI can pass the bar exam. But can it redline a contract? That’s one of questions we set out to answer with some of the world’s top industry experts: - Lawrence H. Summers, former US Treasury Secretary - Cass Sunstein, the most cited legal scholar - Eric Topol, MD, physician and best-selling author - Dominic Barton, former global managing partner of McKinsey - Dozens of professionals from Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Latham & Watkins, Mount Sinai, and more Today, we're launching the Mercor AI Productivity Index (APEX), a benchmark that measures how well AI has automated the most valuable industries in the world. Most benchmarks measure abstract capabilities. APEX evaluates model performance on real deliverables—the same work consultants, bankers, lawyers, and doctors produce every day. Key findings from APEX: - GPT 5 demonstrates the strongest performance across all 4 domains - Some cheaper models outperform more expensive models from the same provider (e.g. Gemini 2.5 Flash vs. Gemini 2.5 Pro)   - The best open source model, Qwen (7th), performs only 2% behind Grok 4 overall This is just the beginning. With APEX v2, we’ll expand to more industries, more complex tasks, and provide an even sharper picture of how AI is reshaping the economy.