AI startup Mercor now valued at $10B with new $350M funding round (www.cnbc.com)

AI hiring startup Mercor announced a $350 million Series C round led by Felicis (with Benchmark, General Catalyst and new investor Robinhood Ventures), boosting its valuation to $10 billion — roughly five times its value since February. The financing will expand Mercor’s talent network, accelerate matching systems that pair subject-matter experts with model-training tasks, and speed up delivery. Mercor says it now manages more than 30,000 contractors who collectively earn over $1.5 million per day, and plans to scale that human-in-the-loop capacity to supply higher-quality, context-rich supervision for AI systems. Technically, Mercor has pivoted from automated recruiting (analyzing transcripts, resumes and portfolios) into a specialized labeling and expert-instruction marketplace that places vetted professionals into targeted training workflows. That shift became more opportunistic after Meta’s $14.3 billion stake in Scale AI and leadership changes at Scale, which Mercor’s cofounder called a sudden weakening of a major competitor. For the AI/ML community, Mercor’s rise signals large investor bets on scalable, high-quality human supervision as a differentiator for model performance and alignment; it also tightens competition with players like Scale, Surge AI, Turing AI and Invisible Technologies in the critical data-labeling and human-feedback layer of the AI stack.