As Amazon lets Mechanical Turk fade, Mercor hits a $2B gross run rate (runtimewire.com)

Mercor, co-founded by Brendan Foody, has achieved a significant milestone, surpassing $2 billion in gross annualized revenue as of June 2026, marking a substantial acceleration in its growth. This development coincides with Amazon's decision to place its Mechanical Turk platform into maintenance mode, highlighting a shift in the AI landscape from general-purpose task completion to a demand for specialized human expertise. Mercor's marketplace focuses on credentialed professionals who provide expert judgment necessary for training, tuning, and evaluating AI models, positioning the company as a vital player in the evolving AI supply chain. The implications of Mercor's growth are profound for the AI/ML community. As traditional platforms like Mechanical Turk fade, Mercor emerges as a leader by supplying high-quality, expert-generated training data that enhances model performance. The company pays domain specialists in fields such as physics and finance to generate tailored insights, catering to AI developers and Fortune 500 clients. While the $2 billion gross revenue figure includes significant contractor payouts, Mercor is reportedly profitable on a free cash flow basis, indicating that if it successfully transitions from merely handling labor to creating valuable data infrastructure, it could secure more sustainable revenue streams in the competitive AI marketplace.