The Interview Copilot hit $10M ARR in 2 years

Mercor hit $500M Revenue Run Rate, MarqVision ARR hit $25M

Sep 16, 2025

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👋 Hey, John here. Welcome to The Signal. The AI Recruiting Marketplace Mercor has already scaled from $1M to $500M in 17 months, while MarqVision ARR hit $25M.

MarqVision ARR Hit $25M

MarqVision is an AI-driven platform that helps global brands protect their intellectual property by detecting and taking down counterfeit products, preventing impersonations, and enforcing rights online and offline.

Founded by Harvard Law alumnus Mark Lee, the company applies computer vision, machine learning, automated enforcement workflows, and legal expertise to monitor online marketplaces, social media, and websites across 118+ countries and more than 1,500 platforms to preserve brand integrity.

MarqVision achieved a key growth milestone earlier in 2025 by surpassing $25M ARR after four years of steady expansion. Its clients span fashion, luxury, gaming, pharmaceuticals, automotive, entertainment, and consumer electronics industries.

With over 350+ brands under its protection, MarqVision is scaling up its enterprise readiness, global operations (recently entering Japan), and the automation of its product suite including generative AI features.

MarqVision has raised $48 million in a Series B round, pushing its total funding to about $90 million.

The new capital is earmarked for engineering teams to accelerate automation, making the platform more enterprise-grade, and expanding geographically. The company targets $100M ARR by mid-2027. The growth has remained efficient, reflecting strong market demand as counterfeiting becomes a growing online threat.

Mercor hit $500M Revenue Run Rate

Yesterday, Elon Musk’s xAI announced the layoff of 500 data labelers—about one-third of the team responsible for annotating and organizing training data for Grok.

Behind this move lies a broader industry shift: demand is moving away from generalist AI tutors and toward specialist tutors in STEM, finance, medicine, and safety.

This same trend is visible in the explosive growth of Mercor. Back in March, the AI recruiting marketplace crossed $100M ARR.

Mercor AI ARR hit $100M in 2 years

John Tian

Mar 24

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Today, CEO Brendan announced that Mercor’s revenue run rate has already surpassed $500M—just 17 months after starting from $1M. Growth is still accelerating, with weekly growth rates climbing from 11% in July to 19% in September.

Brendan attributes this surge to a new paradigm: “The economy is becoming an RL environment machine.”

Reinforcement learning has become so efficient that agents can beat almost any benchmark—but only if humans define the reward functions. In his words, while many fear job loss, what’s actually happening is the creation of an entirely new category of knowledge work: training AI agents.

Mercor is now paying out over $1M a day to people on its platform and hiring experts in nearly every field—software engineers, doctors, lawyers, consultants, bankers, and more.

Brendan argues that each technological revolution has sparked fears of mass unemployment, yet every time it has given rise to entirely new job categories. For AI, that new category is shaping, training, and validating agents.

He draws a historical line: the printing press spread ideas, industrialization scaled labor, computers digitized knowledge—and now AI is making human capabilities shareable.

The true future of work lies in building and maintaining environments where AI models can be trained, tested, and aligned with human standards.

In the long run, Brendan believes we’re entering an “Era of Experience,” where models learn through real-world feedback, much like students guided by teachers or employees reviewed by managers.

The industrial revolution created a new class of machine designers and operators; the AI revolution will create a new class of people who guide and scale intelligent machines. In his paradoxical conclusion: “The future of AI ultimately belongs to humans.”