"In the spring of 2023, while his classmates at Georgetown were cramming for finals, Brendan Foody was busy testing out his new theory of work. "I knew I wanted to drop out before finals my sophomore year," he told Fortune. "I just didn't go to finals.""
"By then, Foody had already found something he couldn't learn in a lecture hall. A few months earlier, at a hackathon in São Paulo, he and his co-founders had stumbled onto a simple but powerful model: match companies with skilled engineers abroad, handle the logistics, and take a small cut of each deal. Their first client agreed to pay $500 a week for a developer; Mercor paid the engineer roughly 70% and kept the rest as a service fee. What began as a way to connect talent soon evolved into something more ambitious: a marketplace where humans could help train the AI systems that might one day replace them. Mercor now hires professionals-consultants, lawyers, bankers, and doctors-to create "evals" and rubrics that test and refine models' reasoning."
Brendan Foody left Georgetown after building a practical business connecting companies with skilled engineers abroad. The founders began by matching firms to remote developers, paying engineers roughly 70% of client fees while keeping a service cut. The marketplace evolved to hire professionals—consultants, lawyers, bankers, and doctors—to create evals and rubrics that test and refine AI models' reasoning. The founders applied structured debate reasoning to codify human judgment and nuance. The company reached a $1 million revenue run rate within nine months and scaled into a multibillion-dollar business within two years, attracting major investors.
Read at Fortune
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