Mercor: The Fastest Growing Company You’ve Never Heard Of

Oct 3

As someone who is in the midst of trying to build two companies at once (yes, blogging is a company!), I can attest that it’s beyond hard and super stressful.
I expect slow and sustained growth, with the hope that one day, I’ll have successful businesses that can support my life (and my husband’s dreams to be a full time Pro Wrestler).

Now, what I don’t expect is for these businesses to to blow up almost overnight and be some of the largest companies in the world.
Which is exactly what happened with this company called Mercor.

Billed by some as “the fastest growing company of all time,” it isn’t a social network, or a delivery app, or even a consumer brand. It lives in a stranger, more hidden place: the pipeline where artificial intelligence learns, thinks, and grows.
And being someone on the daily grind of building businesses, I can really appreciate and admire this company for what it is.

The Business of Teaching Machines

AI doesn’t just come into being and “know” things. It has to be trained, aka fed absolutely enormous quantities of data, labeled, annotated, sorted, and made legible for algorithms that can’t tell a cat from a coffee cup without guidance.

For years, this painstaking work has been handled by companies like Scale AI (recently snapped up by Meta, like most things in the AI space).

Mercor has stepped into this space, but with a twist: it’s not just about labeling data. It’s about creating a marketplace for human talent that can plug into every stage of the large language model (LLM) pipeline.

In other words, Mercor isn’t just teaching machines, it’s building the classroom, recruiting the teachers, and designing the curriculum. An all-in-one stop for those who are creating new AI programs.

Why the Growth Is So Explosive

Well, timing is everything in this life.

AI is scaling faster than any technology in history, and every new model, every updated chatbot, every autonomous car or medical diagnostic tool depends on these massive datasets that have to be combed through and clarified until they make sense to those using them.

The demand is infinite at this moment in time, and Mercor positioned itself as a broker between this need and the vast pool of human annotators, engineers, and specialists willing to fill it.

It’s a labor market, but all for AI. And like all labor markets, it grows in proportion to the world’s hunger for automation.

The Hidden Workforce Behind AI

What makes Mercor fascinating to me really isn’t just its speed, it’s that is’t exposing that behind every shiny AI product is an invisible workforce of people training, tagging, editing, cleaning the mess of raw human data into something a model can digest. Mercor turns that hidden work into a global exchange and paid jobs.
I feel like we often think of AI as cold machines that just bounce around on the internet all day learning things, but the truth is there are real people behind all these AI programs.

And that raises questions for me.

What does it mean when the fastest growing company of our era doesn’t make cars or phones or software for the masses, but instead manages the invisible hands shaping artificial intelligence?

Because, I’ve written about this before, but 95% of Generative AI Projects Are Failing.

While everyone and their mothers scramble to create the next AI program or chatbot (that statistically will fail terribly), Mercor is playing the smart game and selling their product to the absolute explosive mess of startups.

And don’t forget, I also wrote about The AI That Didn’t Take Your Job while we’re talking about AI that didn’t follow through on the things everyone said they would.

The Future They’re Building

If Mercor succeeds on the scale it promises, the future of AI development might look a lot less like Silicon Valley offices and more like a decentralized web of human contributors across the globe, with annotators in Nairobi, engineers in São Paulo, ethicists in Berlin, all of them connected through a single marketplace.

And as someone who loves the thought of Cryptocurrency for the same reason, you know I’ve always been behind decentralization of a lot of things.

Think about it, it’s pretty thrilling, because it opens opportunity on a global scale. In a world where the next AI might make your small culture or country irrelevant, it feels important to have more than one person at the table of representatives while training the AI that comes out of these startups.
It might also be slightly unsettling, because it makes us realize just how dependent AI is on human labor, even as it threatens to replace it.

Why You Should Care

The companies that quietly shape infrastructure often end up defining eras in ways we can’t see until it’s hindsight.

Amazon began as a bookstore, Google began as a search box.
If Mercor is truly the fastest growing company of all time, then its role in building the invisible scaffolding of AI may mark it as one of the most important.
And not because you’ll ever download its app or buy its product, but because everything else you use (search engines, self-driving cars, medical scans, even the words an AI speaks to you when you’re asking it what wine you’ll like the best at the grocery store) may have passed through the hands of its network.

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Michele Gargiulo http://michelegargiulo.com