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Brendan Foody

Co-Founder & CEO, Mercor

Search every verified Brendan Foody interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Brendan Foody, co-founder and CEO of Mercor, discussed the company's growth and his views on the role of human labor in AI development during an October 2026 conversation at South Park Commons. He said he met his co-founders at age 14 and started the company at 19, growing it from $1 million to over $2 billion in revenue run rate in about 24 months. Foody argued that models struggle to learn in non-verifiable domains without human guidance, comparing it to a student grading their own homework. He described Mercor's work with frontier labs and application-layer startups, and mentioned a benchmark called Apex Agents that uses expert-created data rooms to evaluate model performance across professional domains. In September 2026, Foody hosted Gabe Pereyra, co-founder and president of Harvey, on his podcast "The Frontier." During the episode, Pereyra discussed Harvey's early product development, the decision to use closed-source models initially, and the costs of building synthetic data rooms for legal training data. Pereyra estimated that a large synthetic data room could cost around $100,000 in lawyer time and noted the need for thousands of such rooms across hundreds of practice areas. Foody also stated that Mercor aims to define the role of humans in the economy over the next decade, describing the company as "the fastest growing creator of jobs in history."

Recent appearances

  • Mercor's Brendan Foody on Data, Evals & the Last Human Job

    October 15, 2026 · 📺 South Park Commons

    Is model differentiation really just data? What happens to human work when a model can saturate any eval overnight? And what is left for people to do? In this conversation at South Park Commons, member Nick Mecklenburg sits down with Brendan Foody, co-founder and CEO of Mercor. Brendan met his co-founders at 14 and started the company at 19. In about 24 months, he grew it from $1 million to more than $2 billion in revenue run rate. Mercor now works with the frontier labs and with application-layer startups like Harvey, Sierra, Cognition, and Cursor. Brendan argues that the real bottleneck…

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  • Gabe Pereyra - President & Co-Founder of Harvey - The Frontier with Brendan Foody

    September 18, 2026 · 📺 Mercor

    Gabe Pereyra is co-founder and president of Harvey. He was a researcher at Google Brain and DeepMind before starting the company with Winston Weinberg. He and Brendan discuss why big law firms wanted the early product and startup lawyers didn't, the mistake of chasing custom models too early, why partner red lines are the closest thing legal work has to unit tests, what it costs to build a single synthetic data room, and whether there will be more lawyers in five years. Harvey started as a text box wired to a model that wasn't public yet, shown to law firms under NDA. Four years on it runs a…

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  • RL Environments Explained: How AI Agents Learn Real-World Work | Brendan Foody, Mercor

    August 12, 2026 · 📺 Sequoia Capital

    RL environments have become the hottest topic in AI training data. But what are they, exactly? At Sequoia Capital’s Own Your Intelligence event, Mercor CEO Brendan Foody breaks down the three components: worlds (the messages, docs, and files of a real project), apps (high-fidelity clones of tools like Salesforce and Google Workspace), and tasks (prompts paired with rubric-based verifiers). He walks through a real legal environment built with lawyers from top firms, and shares post-training results showing dramatic gains on domain-specific tasks from modest compute. Brendan also covers why hum…

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  • Training the World's Most Advanced AI Models — Brendan Foody, Mercor | High Conviction #3

    June 24, 2026 · 📺 High Conviction Podcast

    Brendan Foody is the Co-founder and CEO of Mercor. Three years ago he dropped out of Georgetown to start Mercor. Today it's valued at $10 billion, paying its global network of experts millions of dollars a day to train the models built by the world's frontier AI labs. In this conversation we get into how Mercor actually works, why post-training turned human expertise into the scarcest input in AI, what the labs are really paying for, and how a company goes from zero to a billion-dollar run rate in under two years. We also talk about competing with Scale, building a 300-person team against a ne…

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  • Mercor CEO: Why Application Layer Companies Have No Moat & The Cost of Hiring AI Researchers

    June 01, 2026 · 📺 20VC with Harry Stebbings

    Brendan Foody is the Founder and CEO @ Mercor, one of the leading data providers to the largest labs on the planet including OpenAI. In the last two years, Brendan has scaled the company to $1.5BN in ARR and a valuation of $10BN. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:13 True or False: Mercor lost Meta & OpenAI as a customer with the hack? 05:52 Are We Entering a Golden Age of Cyber? 11:06 AI, Jobs & Layoffs: How Do Humans Fit Into the New Economy? 21:17 Rejecting a $30B Acquisition 27:39 The Fundraising Story: Helicopters, Ferraris & $10B Valuation 32:50…

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  • Brendan Foody (Mercor) - Agentic Data and the Future of AI [Entire Talk]

    April 15, 2026 · 📺 Stanford eCorner

    Brendan Foody co-founded Mercor, a recruiting startup that helps Silicon Valley's top AI labs train their models to do professional-level reasoning by matching skilled workers with enterprise projects. Foody and his co-founders, Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath, became the world's three youngest self-made billionaires in October 2025. In this conversation with Adjunct Lecturer Emily Ma, Foody shares how he and his co-founders identified agentic data as the next leap in AI training and benchmarking and built Mercor around it; predicts how the AI revolution will reshape work and the economy; and…

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  • Mercor's Brendan Foody on the $10 Billion Human to AI Pipeline | 2026 Upfront Summit

    March 17, 2026 · 📺 Upfront Ventures

    Brendan Foody, CEO of Mercor, sits down with Felicis Managing Partner Sundeep Peechu at the 2026 Upfront Summit to share his vision for the future of work and why human expertise is not being replaced by AI but rather repositioned at the center of it. Brendan explains why the biggest bottleneck in AI development is not compute but evals, why the long tail of human knowledge will persist for decades, and what it looks like when a company builds its entire culture around training the next generation of AI-driven workflows. Topics covered: Why employees will shift from repeating tasks to creat…

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  • Mercor CEO on AI's labor impact: There's going to be a lot of new jobs created

    January 23, 2026 · 📺 CNBC Television

    Brendan Foody, Mercor co-founder and CEO, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the impact of AI on the workforce, navigating the job market in the AI era, what new AI-related jobs could look like, and more. For access to live and exclusive video from CNBC subscribe to CNBC PRO: https://cnb.cx/42d859g » Subscribe to CNBC TV: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBCtelevision » Subscribe to CNBC: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBC » Watch CNBC on the go with CNBC+: https://www.cnbc.com/WatchCNBCPlus Turn to CNBC TV for the latest stock market news and analysis. From market futures to live price updates CNBC is the lea…

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  • Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

    January 07, 2026 · 📺 Conversations with Tyler

    At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets grading verse to economists building evaluation frameworks—and has become one of the fastest-growing startups in history. Tyler and Brendan discuss why Mercor pays poets $150 an hour, why AI labs need rubrics more than raw text, whether we should enshrine the aesthetic standards of past eras rather than current ones, how quickly models are improving at economically valuable tasks, how long until…

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  • Mercor CEO Brendan Foody on using AI for a "new future of work" | TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

    November 05, 2025 · 📺 TechCrunch

    AI isn’t just changing how we work — it’s redefining who gets to work, how teams are built, and what talent looks like in a global, automated economy. Brendan Foody, co-founder and CEO of Mercor, joins the AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 to discuss how his company is using artificial intelligence to connect talent with opportunity in new ways, the implications for hiring and upskilling in an AI-first world, and what the next generation of work platforms will look like. #TechCrunchDisrupt2025 Subscribe for more on YouTube: https://tcrn.ch/youtube Follow TechCrunch on Instagram: http://t…

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  • Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody

    September 18, 2025 · 📺 Lenny's Podcast

    Brendan Foody is the CEO and co-founder of Mercor, the fastest-growing company in history to go from $1M to $500M in revenue (in just 17 months!). At 22, he is also the youngest American unicorn founder ever. Mercor works with 6 of the Magnificent 7 and all top 5 AI labs to help them hire experts to create evaluations and training data that improve their models. In this conversation, Brendan explains why evals have become the critical bottleneck for AI progress, how he discovered this massive opportunity, and what the future of work might look like in an AI-driven economy. Big thank you to Pe…

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  • Mercor CEO & Co-Founder, Brendan Foody: How They Grew from $1M to $500M in 17 Months

    September 15, 2025 · 📺 20VC with Harry Stebbings

    Brendan Foody is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Mercor, the fastest growing company in history. The company solves talent allocation in the AI economy and they have scaled from $1M to $500M in revenue in just 17 months. With a rumoured new funding round pricing the company at a whopping $10BN, the company has the likes of Benchmark, Felicis, Emergence, and of course, 20VC, all on their cap table.  ---------------------------------------------- In Today's Episode We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 01:24 Why My Mother Thought I Was Selling Drugs as a Kid 06:02 In The Time My Peers Graduated, I Created a $10BN…

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The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →