Feeding the machine
The VergeWritten by Josh Dzieza & Hayden FieldArt by Kristen RadtkeFrontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic need vast amounts of data in the race to achieve AGI. This comes at a pretty penny — billions of dollars — and little-known companies like Mercor and Handshake are cleaning up in this AI hype cycle.Published Dec 15, 2025, 11:51 AM GMTLinkShareWhenWhen he was 19 years old, Brendan Foody started Mercor with two of his high school friends as a way for his other friends, who also had startups, to hire software engineers overseas. It launched in 2023 as essentially a staffing agency, albeit a highly automated one. Language models reviewed resumes and did the interviewing. Within months, Mercor was bringing in $1 million in annualized revenue and turning a modest profit.Then, in…
