About Hero Background
Organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy
We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models.
Founded in 2023, Mercor is advancing the frontier of AI with human intelligence. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $3 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work, and Mercor Enterprise brings the same expert network and evaluation infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies deploying AI in production.

Mercor founding story

A note from Brendan & Adarsh

We started Mercor because we believe the most important problem in the world is what people do every day. As we approach AGI, there is enormous uncertainty around what role humans will play in the economy. We wanted to build the company that answers that question.

The leading AI labs and enterprises are racing to build systems that mirror every app, world, and task in the economy. The bottleneck isn't compute. It's human intelligence: the expertise, judgment, and real-world knowledge that only people can provide.

Mercor is organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy.

We find the best experts in every professional domain and put their knowledge to work training frontier models. Through APEX, we measure whether those models can actually perform economically valuable work. We're also bringing that expertise to enterprises: deploying custom AI agents, staffing teams with vetted domain experts, and helping organizations encode their own knowledge into AI systems.

We do all of this in a way that creates real economic value for people.

As AI gets more powerful, human expertise gets more valuable. We're building the company that makes that true.

Brendan Foody & Adarsh Hiremath, Co-founders & Co-CEOs

Mercor leadership team

The people building Mercor

  • Brendan Foody

    Brendan Foody

    Co-Founder, Co-CEO

    Brendan leads Mercor's business, growth, and go-to-market strategy. He has been building companies since high school and dropped out of Georgetown to build Mercor full-time. He is a leading voice on the future of work in the AI economy.

  • Adarsh Hiremath

    Adarsh Hiremath

    Co-Founder, Co-CEO

    Adarsh leads Mercor's technology, product and enterprise strategy. He dropped out of Harvard, where he studied computer science and conducted ML research.

  • Sundeep Jain

    Sundeep Jain

    President

    Sundeep was CPO and SVP of Engineering at Uber, where he led a 3,000-person team across global Mobility and Delivery. Before that, he was VP of Product Management at Google overseeing Search Ads. He holds a CS degree from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

  • Kevin Shiau

    Kevin Shiau

    Chief Financial Officer

    Kevin spent eight years at Tesla, most recently as division CFO of Tesla Energy. Earlier in his career he worked in investment banking at Citigroup and held roles at Amazon and First Solar. He joined Mercor to build the finance function for an agentic world.

  • Aref Wardak

    Aref Wardak

    General Counsel

    Aref was previously General Counsel at Applied Intuition and Menlo Security. He holds a JD from the University of Michigan Law School.