---
title: "Mercor Raises $750 Million at $20 Billion Valuation"
url: https://www.heretallahassee.com/2026/11/11/mercor-raises-750-million-20-billion-valuation/
date: 2026-11-11T06:15:49-05:00
modified: 2026-11-11T06:15:49-05:00
author: "Merger Monday"
categories: ["Business", "National"]
site: "HERE Tallahassee"
attribution: "HERE Tallahassee"
---

# Mercor Raises $750 Million at $20 Billion Valuation

*Source: [HERE Tallahassee](https://www.heretallahassee.com/2026/11/11/mercor-raises-750-million-20-billion-valuation/) — November 11, 2026 by Merger Monday*

Mercor, the San Francisco startup that pays human experts to train and grade artificial-intelligence models, raised $750 million in a Series D round that values it at $20 billion, double its price tag of a year ago.

The company didn’t name a lead investor. Nvidia, Salesforce and Zoom Communications joined as corporate backers, and earlier investors Benchmark, Felicis and General Catalyst returned. Sapphire Ventures, StepStone Group, G Squared, Glade Brook Capital, XTX Ventures, Fundomo and funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management also took part. Co-founder Brendan Foody said in a blog post that the round included a tender offer for employee shares. Mercor didn’t break out how much of the $750 million went to the tender rather than to the company.

## From the labs to everyone else

Mercor’s last raise was a $350 million Series C led by Felicis in October 2025 that valued it at $10 billion. Since then the business of supplying expert feedback to AI developers has boomed. Foody said in July that annualized revenue had passed $2 billion. The company draws on a network of more than five million doctors, lawyers, engineers and other specialists, and most of its work so far has been for the frontier labs building the largest models.

The new money is aimed at a broader market. Mercor builds custom benchmarks from a company’s own workflows, then uses the results to post-train models, often open ones, on that company’s work. It bought Deeptune, a New York startup that recreates enterprise software as practice environments for AI agents, in July. Co-CEOs Foody and Adarsh Hiremath argue that a model can do well on public tests and still fail on the rules and edge cases of a particular business.

## Context

The round lands as investors debate how much to pay for AI exposure. On the same day, Anthropic set a price range valuing it at up to $1.4 trillion, and private rounds for AI suppliers have kept stepping up, including Nominal’s tripled valuation on Monday. Mercor also faces scrutiny from an April data breach that led Meta to pause work with it; neither the company’s announcement nor Foody’s post addressed the incident.