At General Catalyst, we back founders who move fast, think big, and build with relentless urgency. From the moment we met Mercor’s co-founders, Brendan, Adarsh, and Surya in 2023, it was clear they were wired differently. They had a rare combination of intellectual intensity, deep trust in one another, and an unshakable vision for shaping the future of human talent matching with applied AI.

The trio met in high school, sharpened their competitive instincts through debate, and have lived and built together ever since. At just 19, with less than a year of university behind them, they made the bold decision to drop out—not just to start a company, but to tackle one of the most challenging and valuable problems globally: matching the best talent with the right opportunities at scale. As they built the infrastructure to find, assess, and deploy talent, they uncovered an even larger opportunity in AI. Since leading their seed round in 2023, we’ve had the privilege to watch Mercor’s extraordinary trajectory. What started as an ambitious idea has rapidly become a leading human data provider for the world’s top AI labs. 

As foundation model providers exhausted publicly available datasets, further improving AI capabilities requires high-quality, proprietary human data. Mercor recognized this inflection point early on and built the infrastructure to systematically source, evaluate, and match highly skilled talent—lawyers, mathematicians, consultants, and other domain experts—in order to continuously improve the capabilities of future AI models. On their mission to become the world’s best at predicting human performance, they are already outperforming human recruiters today and have quickly emerged as a critical pillar of the AI supply chain. 

But transformative companies don’t just build great products—they build cultures that attract the most ambitious minds. Mercor has quickly emerged as one of the key gravity wells in Silicon Valley. What they’ve built is remarkable—but what’s ahead is even bigger. Today, as Mercor announces its $100M Series B led by our friends at Felicis, we couldn’t be more excited to continue backing them. The best is yet to come.