---
title: 'Mercor AI Research Fund Grants at Mercor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/mercor-ai-research-fund-grants-mercor-san-francisco-jb770hz49gys'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Mercor AI Research Fund Grants at Mercor

- **Company:** Mercor
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** temporary
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-09-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/e1f6792d-1aae-4c2e-8edb-e2b91343dbb5

## Job description

## About Mercor

Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.

Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.

Mercor AI Research Fund Grants $5M One of the biggest challenges facing the industry today is determining whether frontier AI is capable enough to deliver value in real-world settings. A model can perform well on benchmarks and still struggle in production. That’s why investing in research, realistic evaluations, and robust verification is critical. Mercor is committing $5 million to fund AI research. Award size and mix depend on the project. The grant supports:

- The time of experts from Mercor's platform
- Researcher hours
- API costs
- Stipends for event and conference attendance

This is separate from the Mercor Research Fellowship, which funds individual experts (apply[HERE](https://www.mercor.com/careers/a0a98be0-d856-4129-b500-c0a3e412ef01/)) and our $5m of safety funding awards (apply[HERE](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/1d59ce50-4207-4d95-b7fd-5a01e90b0897)).

## What we're looking for

- Real-world evaluations: measuring whether benchmark performance translates into reliable performance on realistic tasks and workflows
- Environments: building high-fidelity, interactive environments that capture the complexity of real-world work
- Long-horizon tasks: evaluating and improving models’ ability to plan, execute, and adapt across extended workflows
- Agentic capabilities: tool use, coordination, memory, and autonomous execution
- Reasoning and problem-solving: improving performance on complex, ambiguous, or underspecified tasks
- Post-training: developing better data, rewards, and training methods to improve model capabilities
- Evaluation methodology: creating more robust measures of capability, reliability, and real-world utility

## Why us

- Funding for researcher time, API costs, and event attendance
- Where useful to the work: access to Mercor's expert network for human grading and annotation: lawyers, accountants, engineers, scientists, clinicians
- Access to Mercor's internal evaluation infrastructure, subject to review
- Introductions to Mercor's network of researchers across frontier labs and academia

Who should apply

- Researchers at universities and non-profit research organizations, as well as public benefit corporations and small startups that do not sell AI training data. Awards are made to the researcher’s institution.
- People with a specific, well-scoped question: the grant is built around your proposal, not a generic research rotation
- Applicants based in the United States or the United Kingdom
- Bonus: researchers with experience with agentic evaluation, RL environments, and post-training.

We expect grantees to publish – such as a paper, an open dataset, a public methodology, or a tool the field can use, released under an open license that permits commercial use.

Award terms Selected grantees will sign Mercor’s research award agreement. Key terms include:

- Grantees keep ownership of their work and grant Mercor a non-exclusive license to use it, including commercially.
- Mercor may identify grantees and their institutions as award recipients, including by name and logo. Grantees may use Mercor’s logo with Mercor’s approval.
- For benchmark and evaluation projects, Mercor receives early access to the benchmark before public release and the exclusive right to build and host a private held-out test set, at Mercor’s cost.
- Grantees agree not to work with specified Mercor competitors on substantially similar benchmarks or evaluations during the award and for 12 months afterward.
- Grantees are free to publish their findings. Mercor reviews drafts in advance only to remove its confidential information.
- Awards are subject to tax documentation, sanctions screening, and periodic progress reports.

How to apply Submit an Expression of Interest. We expect to see a one- or two-page document. It should contain at least a section on your team, background, and research accomplishments; a section on your proposed research project; and a section on the outputs and impact of the project, with directionally correct timelines and resource requirements. Please do not include confidential or proprietary information in your Expression of Interest. Submitting an Expression of Interest does not obligate Mercor to make an award.

## About Mercor

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Mercor organizes human intelligence to power the AI economy by connecting domain experts with frontier AI labs and enterprises for model training, evaluation, and deployment.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (with offices in New York City and London)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Brendan Foody & Adarsh Hiremath (Co-founders & Co-CEOs)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: AI Data & Infrastructure, Human-in-the-Loop AI, Enterprise AI
- Target customers: Frontier AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), Fortune 500 enterprises deploying AI in production, and domain experts seeking high-value AI work
- Mission: Organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy — building the layer between human expertise and frontier models.

## Products & Services
- **Mercor Platform**: A global network of millions of domain experts across 300+ professional fields, paid over $3 million per day to train frontier AI models. Experts are found and vetted using dynamic, role-specific AI interviews.
- **APEX Benchmark**: A benchmark family that measures AI's real-world impact on professional work, setting a standard for whether AI can perform economically valuable work.
- **Mercor Enterprise**: Brings Mercor's expert network and evaluation infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies, deploying custom AI agents, staffing teams with vetted domain experts, and helping organizations encode their own knowledge into AI systems.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $10 billion valuation (as of Series C)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding — $350 million Series C (recently raised); company is profitable
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not explicitly named in provided sources, but the company works with leading AI labs and Fortune 500 enterprises
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Named to Bloomberg's "2026 24 AI Startups to Watch"
  - Forbes AI 50 (2025)
  - Forbes Cloud 100 (2025)
  - LinkedIn Top Startup (2025)
  - Described as "the fastest-growing company in the world"
  - Tens of thousands of skilled professionals earning an average of more than $95/hour on the platform

## Competitive Advantages
- **Massive, vetted expert network**: Millions of domain experts across 300+ fields, found and vetted via AI-driven interviews — a hard-to-replicate moat.
- **Direct frontier model exposure**: Every team works directly with frontier models, training them and building around them — most companies haven't imagined this level of integration.
- **Profitability at scale**: Profitable at Series C with a $10B valuation, indicating strong unit economics.
- **End-to-end AI infrastructure**: From expert sourcing and vetting to model evaluation (APEX) to enterprise deployment — a vertically integrated stack.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling the expert network**: Continuing to onboard millions of domain experts globally to meet the insatiable demand for high-quality human training data.
- **Enterprise AI deployment**: Expanding Mercor Enterprise to help Fortune 500 companies encode organizational knowledge into AI systems and deploy custom agents.
- **Benchmarking AI's economic impact**: Growing the APEX benchmark as the standard for measuring whether AI can perform economically valuable work.
- **Preparing for AGI**: The company's founding thesis is about answering what role humans will play in the economy as AGI approaches.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: "Built for people who thrive in high-velocity environments." Values include Intensity, Simplicity, User Obsession, High Standards, Can-Do Attitude, and Time Travelers (thinking ahead).
- **Work model**: In-person collaboration from offices in San Francisco, New York City, and London. No remote option — the company believes in-person collaboration helps move faster and solve harder problems.
- **Engineering culture**: Direct exposure to frontier AI research, labs, and startups. Every team works with frontier models daily. Described as "the fastest-growing company in the world."
- **Compensation**: Generous equity grants, competitive salaries (ranges from $100K–$500K depending on role), and a "proximity bonus" (generous annual housing support).
- **Benefits**: 
  - Unlimited paid vacation and sick days
  - Free Equinox membership (premium fitness access)
  - Monthly wellness stipend and free mental health services
  - Monthly food stipend
  - 401k with employer match
  - Parental leave for both birthing and non-birthing parents
- **Team**: "A team of ambitious, diverse people who want to work on what matters most." Open roles across Engineering (31 roles), Operations (15 roles), Enterprise (5 roles), Finance (4 roles), and more.

## Sources
1. [mercor.com](https://www.mercor.com/)
2. [mercor.com/careers](https://www.mercor.com/careers/)
3. [mercor.com/mission](https://www.mercor.com/mission/)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor)
5. [linkedin.com/company/mercor-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/mercor-ai)

## Other roles at Mercor

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- [Member of Design Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-design-staff-mercor-san-francisco-q43xwabz87gr) — San Francisco, CA
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