Mercor’s $2B revenue run rate reveals AI’s biggest bottleneck, and why crypto wants in

A three-year-old startup you’ve probably never heard of is quietly processing more than $2 million in daily payouts to contractors who teach AI models how to think. Mercor, a San Francisco-based AI recruiting and data platform, hit $614 million in gross revenue during the first half of 2026, with an annualized run rate now touching $2 billion. More than 90% of that revenue comes from just three customers: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. The numbers behind the hype Mercor’s growth trajectory is genuinely staggering. The company reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, then scaled to $2 billion just four months later. That $2 billion figure represents a 70% increase compared to its entire revenue for 2025. The platform connects roughly 30,000 domain experts and contractors with AI research labs. These workers handle data labeling, model evaluation, and reinforcement learning from human feedback, commonly known as RLHF. Contractors earn an average of $105 per hour. The company has raised $486 million in funding and currently carries a $10 billion valuation. Mercor was founded around 2023 by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha. Why crypto cares about human ...