AI startup Mercor now valued at $10 billion with new $350 million funding round
Artificial intelligence startup Mercor announced on Monday a new Series C round that values the company at $10 billion, a fivefold increase since its last raise in February.
The company said in a blog post that it raised $350 million in a round led by Felicis, which also led its $100 million Series B round, with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and new investor Robinhood Ventures.
The new investment will feed into three focus areas: Expanding the company’s talent network, advancing its matching systems between experts and training opportunities, and providing faster delivery.
Founded in by three Thiel Fellows, the company initially started as a hiring company that assessed candidates by analyzing interview transcripts, resumes and personal portfolio websites to make recruiting decisions.
After inadvertently amassing a network of specialized experts, the startup has pivoted to hiring highly skilled professionals to train AI models.
Mercor now manages over 30,000 contractors, who are collectively paid over $1.5 million each day and teach agents to think more like humans by “sharing knowledge, experience, and context that can’t be captured in code alone,” the startup wrote in a blog post.
The company was able to take advantage of the pivot to data-labeling after Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI in June. As part of the deal, founder and then CEO Alexandr Wang stepped down to join the social media company.
Concerns over Scale AI’s neutrality following the Meta investment reportedly caused some large AI labs, including Google and OpenAI, to cut ties following the deal.
“It just doesn’t happen too often in startups where your biggest competitor gets torpedoed overnight,” cofounder Adarsh Hiremath told Forbes.
The startup still faces competition in the data-labeling space, including Scale AI rival Surge AI, which is reportedly aiming for up to $1 billion in a new raise, according to Reuters. Turing AI reached a valuation of $2.2 billion in March, and Invisible Technologies raised $100 million in a new round to reach a value of over $2 billion in September.
Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.
Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.
Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.
Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.
“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.
Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.
DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.
The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.
SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.
Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.
“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.
The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.
AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.
Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.
WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software
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