Latest news with #Mercor
Time of India
04-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Silicon Valley's new success is a $2-bn job platform with an Indian origin story
Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha were college students when they first created their artificial intelligence (AI) interviewer. Initially, they were using the AI interview as a screening tool for engineers in India and matching those engineers with US startup jobs. Now, their AI interview has screened around half a million candidates, and their AI job marketplace, Mercor, is valued at $2 now works predominantly with some of the largest AI labs and tech companies in the world, including OpenAI and Meta, to screen talent using their AI interview and staff them on short-term contracts. 'Initially, we were just placing tech grads in India with startups run by our contemporaries,' said Virat Talwar, a product manager at Mercor, and its first employee, 'but not long after, we realised that we could generalise the products we had built to a much larger market.'. Products spearheaded by Talwar and the Mercor team have now processed close to 500,000 applicants, placing over 5,000 people around the world in part-time and full-time opportunities.A large amount of the contract work that members of Mercor's talent pool now do revolves around evaluating the capabilities of AI models, and working on projects that help cutting-edge AI researchers. Talent on the platform is global, while they have people from the US, Europe, and Latin America, a large part of the talent pool is based in India. In fact, around half of the company's internal team is based in India. 'The benefit of starting with an Indian talent pool is that we were able to attract and hire some of the best young Indian tech talent internally,' says Talwar, who is based in San Francisco but grew up in Delhi before moving abroad to study at Harvard of the members of the team based in India is Soumi De, the company's Head of Sourcing. She helps support the global sourcing strategy that fuels Mercor's AI marketplace, playing a pivotal role in building the supply engine that matches thousands of candidates to cutting-edge AI opportunities. 'Our goal is simple but ambitious: to deliver the right talent at the right time, every time,' said De. 'We've built an adaptive sourcing system that's designed not just for growth, but for precision and velocity.''Growing up in India and majoring in computer science, I saw how disconnected hiring often is from actual job performance first-hand,' said De. 'Top-tier talent would get overlooked because they didn't 'crack' the process, while others who performed well in interviews didn't always thrive on the job.'Mercor is now focusing on creating a talent experience shaped by a deeply practical approach to sourcing. 'Traditional recruiting needs to adapt. It shouldn't be about jumping through hoops; it should be about capability, clarity, and match. That's what we're building at Mercor.' De believes this shift isn't just progressive, it's inevitable. 'Companies can't afford the inefficiencies of outdated processes anymore. Mercor is ahead of the curve in shaping a modern hiring ecosystem, one where both companies and candidates win.'As the hiring landscape continues to evolve, Mercor's model is proving that a more equitable, performance-based approach isn't just idealistic, it's operationally sound and commercially necessary. Mercor is not just riding the future of work, it's helping build it.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Bay Area tech job posting looking for people willing to work 6 days a week
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — A recent Bay Area tech job posting that surfaced on LinkedIn this week has raised eyebrows online. While key responsibilities for the posting are fairly standard; 'lead, mentor, and scale an international team,' 'act as the voice of the user,' 'define and monitor metrics,' one aspect of the posting stands out. The job posting for a 'Customer Service Engineer' at AI staffing startup Mercor lists 'willingness to work 6 days a week' at the top of qualifications for the job. 'We know this isn't for everyone, so we want to put it up top. We do work hard but also respect your work-life balance. This will not be negotiable,' the post reads. When the posting was shared on Reddit, many users compared it to China's '996' work practice, which requires people to work from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. six days a week. 'It part of this whole 9-9-6 work culture thing thats trending in Silicon Valley, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week. Founders really seem to be sniffing glue again,' one posted commented. 'I'd rather eat glass,' said another. 'I've only experienced this at Chinese run companies,' said another poster. 'China is where the 9-9-6 originated. But the companies that push it churn and burn over time.' 'That's like $34/hr. That's so not worth it,' said another. However, taking only one day off a week doesn't appear to be a dealbreaker for everyone. The job, which is advertised as having a salary between $130,000 and $200,000, was posted late last week. In the four days since it went live, 80 people have clicked apply, according to LinkedIn. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Forbes
06-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Local Governments Are Using This Startup's AI Agents
Welcome back to The Prompt, Hustle culture that involves long hours and late nights has always been a fixture in Silicon Valley. But in the race to ship products and features faster, some AI startups are encouraging–and in some cases, requiring–employees to work 6 or 7 days a week, Forbes exclusively reported . Among them are some of the buzziest like hiring platform Mercor and customer service-focused tool Decagon. Now let's get into the headlines. OpenAI's complicated restructuring endeavors have taken yet another turn. The company announced that its nonprofit parent will continue to have control over ChatGPT and other products, a reversal of an earlier announcement that it would not. OpenAI plans to go ahead with converting its structure into a public benefit corporation to continue raising capital and remove caps on investors' returns. The decision comes after it faced staunch opposition from former cofounder and rival Elon Musk, as well as a number of former employees, who claimed that OpenAI was straying away from its original mission. Back in 2015, OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab, but the recent popularity of ChatGPT sparked an AI arms race in Silicon Valley that has resulted in more demand for its tools. To meet that demand, OpenAI announced a $40 billion investment from Softbank and others, $30 billion of which is contingent on the company's restructuring. AI DEALS OF THE WEEK Identity verification startup Persona raised $200 million in Series D funding led by Ribbit Capital and Founders Fund, reaching a $2 billion valuation. The company is helping companies OpenAI, LinkedIn, Reddit and DoorDash ensure that their users are real and who they say they are— an increasingly challenging task as billions of bot surf the internet with the rise of AI agents. Decagon, which is building AI agents for customer service, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, Forbes exclusively reported . Cybersecurity startup Doppel is developing AI agents to automatically flag hundreds of malicious ads and fake accounts for businesses like Notion, and has raised $35 million in new funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. OpenAI has agreed to buy AI-powered coding tool Windsurf (formerly Codeium ) for $3 billion, Bloomberg reported. The company was featured on the 2024 Forbes Next Billion Dollar Startup List and the Forbes AI 50 list this year. The news comes as Cursor, one of the hottest AI tools of the year, has closed a $900 million round at a $9 billion valuation, the Financial Times reported . DEEP DIVE Cofounder and CEO Bernard Aceituno (left) and CTO Antoni Rosinol (right) started their company in ... More 2022. Stack AI Entrepreneurs often create products to cater to niche problems in a specific industry. But for Stack AI cofounder and CEO Bernard Aceituno, the opposite is also true. His company is creating chatbots and AI agents that can automate a broad buffet of back office jobs across functions like finance, HR and customer support, doing things like processing RFPs, reviewing contracts, conducting audits and helping train staff. Today, its users have created some 100,000 agents with it, Aceituno claims. These are already in use within some 200 organizations including Nubank as well as one defense agency (Aceituno did not specify which.) Local government agencies in California, Texas and Massachusetts are using Stack's artificial intelligence systems to pour through piles of documents and extract data that can then be used for a bunch of other tasks, 'cutting middle management bottlenecks,' Aceituno said. Aceituno claims his company's AI agents are helping healthcare companies with constrained budgets and staff crunches, deal with thousands of inquiries. Government contracts are using them to fill out dozens of applications with just 20% of the workforces. The company announced Tuesday it has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by Lobby Capital. Aceituno, who previously built visual-based machine learning models at Meta, says 'AI models are trapped behind Jupiter notebooks.' With Stack AI, enterprises can connect their agents to their internal documents and databases and use off the shelf model from over 30 providers. Originally from Venezuela, Aceituno first experimented with GPT 3 to summarize parts of his own PhD thesis at MIT. He believes tech stacks should be more versatile and applicable to a wide host of tasks. He claims his company offers a platform with the building blocks that can be customized based on the task at hand, while taking data security and privacy into account. 'We want to be the Excels of the world,' he says. MODEL BEHAVIOR AI companies have deployed a slew of so-called 'reasoning' models that appear to break down problems into a series of logical steps to produce an answer. But it turns out these advanced systems are more prone to generating errors and making up false information (also known as hallucination), than the previous generation of models, according to The New York Times. For newer AI models, hallucination rates can reach as high as 79%.
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Investor Says AI Is Already "Fully Replacing People"
The hype over artificial intelligence might be quieting as the US tech sector stresses over tariffs, but some investors are still knee-deep in the mud, panning for gold. One of them, prominent venture capitalist and former gaming CEO Victor Lazarte, is so confident that he claims AI is already "fully replacing people." While some companies have pumped the breaks on hyped-up promises of a fully-automated future, Lazarte is charging full steam ahead. "Big companies talk about, like, 'AI isn't replacing people, it's augmenting them,'" the tycoon said on the Twenty Minute VC podcast. "This is bullshit. It's fully replacing people." As per Business Insider, Lazarte highlighted that lawyers and HR workers should be particularly nervous that AI is coming for their jobs, noting that law school students "should think about what they could do three years from now that AI could not." It's a curious claim coming from a guy like Lazarte, whose firm, Benchmark, is heavily invested in startups like AI-based hiring platform Mercor and AI-powered research lab Decart. The venture capitalist doesn't bother to provide receipts for his claim, instead insinuating: I have a lot of money riding in this, trust me. In order to dig into his claim, we'll have to look at examples of AI in law and recruiting today — and boy is it a disaster. Starting with law, recent headlines aren't great. A New York Supreme Court judge recently slammed an entrepreneur for trying to pass an AI-generated video off as a stand-in for a human lawyer. The man was reportedly testing his legal-aid startup software, called Pro Se Pro, in the real world. "You are not going to use this courtroom as a launch for your business," boomed the justice. Other high profile incidents include one where Michael Cohen, Trump's former legal counsel and White House plumber, was caught filing AI generated briefs, which might have been fine if the software didn't completely make up the cases he was citing. Though there are a lot of startup founders and investors who, like Lazarte, have a personal interest in passing off AI as "ready for the courtroom," actual legal pros aren't convinced. "I think courts will clamp down before AI appearances can gain a foothold," law professor Mark Bartholomew told BI. The reason, of course, is AI's deep-seated penchant to spit out an answer as fast as it can, accuracy be damned. "If you type a legal question into the Google search function, then generative AI is all too ready to answer," wrote legal columnist Virginia Hammerle. "That is not a good thing." And when it comes to hiring, well, that's a whole other fiasco. Though today's AI models are chock full of racist and misogynist biases — courtesy of the real-life data they're trained on — companies are nonetheless blazing ahead by putting AI in charge of human resources. One study found that 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies were using AI to filter applicants, and there's a growing push to sell AI to do the actual interviewing as well. That's creating a hellish environment for job seekers, as some candidates deploy their own AI to fight the hiring AI and spam job listings with applications. It's a vicious cycle that's boxing out non-AI savvy job seekers — especially disabled, elderly, and immigrant workers — while making AI spam a precondition for finding a job. When it comes to playing fast and loose with AI, UC Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid sums it up best: "Just because something is inevitable, it doesn't mean you deploy [it]." More on AI: Freelancers Are Getting Ruined by AI Sign in to access your portfolio
Bloomberg
20-02-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
AI Startup Led by 21-Year-Old Thiel Fellow Lands $2 Billion Valuation
Artificial intelligence-powered hiring startup Mercor has notched a valuation of $2 billion in a new funding round — a massive markup for the small San Francisco-based team and the latest sign of continuing AI exuberance. The startup, which investors valued at $250 million in September, raised $100 million in the deal, which was led by Felicis, with participation from General Catalyst, DST Global, Benchmark and Menlo Ventures. Previous investors include Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey and Larry Summers.
