Feeding the machine
When he was 19 years old, Brendan Foody started Mercor with two of his high school friends as a way for his other friends, who also had startups, to hire software engineers overseas. It launched in 2023 as essentially a staffing agency, albeit a highly automated one. Language models reviewed resumes and did the interviewing. Within months, Mercor was bringing in $1 million in annualized revenue and turning a modest profit. Then, in early 2024, the company Scale AI approached Mercor with a big request: They needed 1,200 software engineers. At the time, Scale was one of the only well-known names in the historically back-of-house business of producing AI training data. It had grown to a valuation of nearly $14 billion by orchestrating hundreds of thousands of people around the world to label data for self-driving cars, e-commerce algorithms, and language-model-powered chatbots. Now that OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies were trying to teach their chatbots to code, Scale needed softw...