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SAN FRANCISCO – Mercor announced a $750 million Series D at a $20 billion valuation Tuesday, saying it will expand the infrastructure and research that help companies evaluate and further train artificial-intelligence models for their own work.
The round included an employee tender, co-founder Brendan Foody wrote in the company’s November 10 announcement. The company did not separate the tender from the rest of the financing in that post, so the full $750 million should not be read as new operating cash going to Mercor.
Participating investors included Benchmark, General Catalyst, NVIDIA, Salesforce and Zoom, alongside Felicis, Fundomo, funds managed by affiliates of Apollo, G Squared, Glade Brook Capital, Sapphire Ventures, StepStone Group and XTX Ventures.
Mercor supplies human expertise and training data to help AI developers and businesses measure and improve models. The company says it is extending capabilities built for frontier AI labs to enterprises that want to test agents against their own systems, policies and quality standards.
Its funding release describes custom evaluations as a way to measure how reliably agents complete tasks and at what cost. Those tests can then guide post-training, the additional work used to adapt a model after its initial training.
Mercor says the funding will support evaluation and post-training infrastructure, research and realistic environments in which AI agents can practice professional workflows. It acquired Deeptune earlier this year, adding a team that recreated enterprise applications as training environments, according to the company.
The company says its network includes more than five million experts. Foody also said Mercor opened offices in New York and London this year beyond its San Francisco base. The network size and expansion are company-reported figures and developments.
What it means: Mercor is pitching businesses a way to judge AI against the work they actually need done, rather than relying on a general benchmark. The announcement sets out its financing and expansion plans; it does not establish that a particular customer’s AI system meets that customer’s performance standards.
JBizNews Desk | Business & Technology
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