Our verdict
Mercor is a real, large employer of expert contractors: valued at $10B and reporting a gross run rate above $2B, so the volume of work is substantial. It pays referrers 20% of a referral's earnings up to a cap of $250-$15,000. It confirmed a cyberattack in March 2026 and faces class actions, so protect your account. We have not scored pay yet.
The facts, with receipts
Every row links to its source.
| Fact | Value and source |
|---|---|
| Reported run rate | Above $2B gross run rate (June 2026) |
| Data it buys | Slack, Teams, Gmail, Outlook, Confluence, Salesforce, GitHub, Drive, Notion and 100+ other tools |
| Seller fees | No fees |
| Time to payment | Wire 2-4 weeks after signing |
| Security attestation | SOC 2 Type II |
| Company referral program | Exists; payout amount not published |
| Contractor referral bonus | 20% of the referral's earnings, up to a cap of $250-$15,000 |
| Spirit Airlines archive bid | Bid $7.5M; Google won with $10M, Mercor is the backup buyer |
| Valuation | $10B after a $350M Series C |
| Acquisition | Acquired Sepal AI |
| Acquisition | Acquired Deeptune to build training environments for AI agents |
| Industries Mercor Data names | Legal; healthcare; finance and insurance; professional services; manufacturing; retail and e-commerce; real estate; logistics and supply chain |
| Approach to an acquired startup | Mercor approached Warmly about its archives after HubSpot acquired the company |
| Mercor: company size | No minimum company size stated on its data page |
| Mercor's LinkedIn claim | Partnered with over 300 enterprises, paying companies up to $10M per enterprise |
| Tools across Mercor's partners | Slack 55%, GitHub 53%, Google Drive 53%, Gmail 50%, Figma 40%, Jira 35% |
| How Mercor collects | Mercor's ads say it "connects to the tools you already use, anonymizes what's inside" |
| Who Mercor advertises to | Account-based video ads naming large enterprises (Marsh McLennan, Chubb, Capital One), with the line "Monetize company data. Safeguard company secrets."; its Meta ads are recruiting only |
| Mercor's approach to Warmly | Eight days after Warmly agreed to be acquired by HubSpot in late June 2026, Mercor emailed Warmly's CEO offering to buy or license its code and task records |
| Exclusivity terms | Not mentioned on its data page |
| Retail and e-commerce data Mercor names | Order records, inventory logs, listings |
| Real estate data Mercor names | Listings, leases, inspection reports |
| Logistics and supply chain data Mercor names | Shipping manifests, dispatch logs, invoices |
| Professional services data Mercor names | Client decks, SOWs, project files |
| Manufacturing data Mercor names | Work orders, QA logs, spec sheets |
| What Mercor takes from GitHub | Repositories, commits, PRs and issues |
| Mercor on company size | States no minimum headcount or years in business on its data page |
| Legal documents Mercor names | Contracts, case files, discovery docs |
| Finance and insurance documents Mercor names | Statements, underwriting files, claims |
| Healthcare documents Mercor names | Clinical notes, claims, intake forms |
| Real estate documents Mercor names | Listings, leases, inspection reports |
| How Mercor handles data before release | No data leaves the seller's systems until the seller approves it; extraction and anonymization are automated, and no AI lab sees raw data |
| Who founded Mercor | Founded in 2023 by Brendan Foody (CEO), Adarsh Hiremath (CTO) and Surya Midha (board chair) |
| Mercor's customers | Mercor's customers include Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta |
| Mercor's June 2026 update on the breach | Of nearly five million experts, "a very limited subset" had sensitive information affected; no employee data was affected; the impact on customer information was "very limited" |
| Security changes Mercor lists | Auditing all third-party code it depends on, rotating credentials and keys, tighter cloud and network controls, outside penetration testing and 24/7 managed detection and response |
| How Mercor Data collects | Businesses link accounts from 100+ supported tools; extraction and anonymization are "fully automated", and no AI lab buyer or third-party vendor sees the raw data |
| What sets Mercor's payout | Data volume, the tools you connect and the depth of your data; connecting more tools raises the payout |
| Offer range | Not published |
| Security incident | Confirmed a cyberattack tied to the compromise of the open-source LiteLLM project |
| Litigation | Several class actions filed on 2026-04-01 in the Northern District of California after the breach |
| What the attackers claimed | The extortion group Lapsus$ claimed up to four terabytes, including source code and database records, and posted samples such as apparent Slack data, ticketing records and videos of AI interviews with contractors |
How we rated them
The rating for experts is a weighted average of the parts below, using only what is published. See how we rate.
Not enough public information to draw this chart yet. We only chart what a source supports.
- Pay level and evidence No data
- Work availability No data
- Payment reliability No data
- Onboarding fairness No data
- Reputation and incidents No data
What we know
Mercor for other readers
Incidents and conflicts
Reader reviews
What people who worked with Mercor say
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FAQ
Mercor: questions, answered
Mercor confirmed a cyberattack on 31 March 2026, tied to the compromise of the open-source LiteLLM project, and several class actions were filed in the Northern District of California on 1 April. Mercor later called the affected data a very limited subset. No reliable count of affected people has been published.1,2
We do not publish a pay ranking yet, because we will only score pay from a public index of job listings and that index is still being built. Until it is published, pay scores on this site show as not enough public data rather than a guess.
Mercor pays 20% of what the person you refer earns, up to a cap that its referrals page puts between $250 and $15,000 per referral depending on the role. The bonus comes from Mercor, not from the person you refer.9
Change log
- First published.