Mercor is one of the leading companies powering AI progress, building the marketplace for expertise that trains many of the world's best models.

In under four years, it's become one of the fastest companies in history to reportedly cross $1B in annual revenue.

USVC was fortunate to get in at Mercor's Series C, taking a $2 million position at a $10 billion valuation.

Here's why we invested and what it means for our investors.

Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha met as high-school debaters at Bellarmine College Prep. In early 2023, they dropped out of Georgetown and Harvard to start a company together. A year later, all three were named Thiel Fellows.

Although known for it today, they didn't start by building an AI training company. Mercor began as software that interviewed, vetted, and matched talent to companies that needed them. It worked quickly, growing from $1 million to a $100 million run rate in roughly eleven months.

What pulled the business forward was not ordinary hiring, though. It was the AI labs.

Training a frontier model takes more than compute: it takes human experts to generate the data, write the rubrics, and stress-test what the model learns, and the labs needed them by the thousand. Mercor's matching engine, built to source and vet talent at speed, turned out to be the machinery to meet demand. The faster the labs scaled, the more expertise they needed, and the more work ran through Mercor.

When Meta invested $14.3 billion into Scale AI (arguably the dominant player in AI training data at the time), Scale's neutrality became questionable overnight.

OpenAI, Google, and other labs did not love the idea of their training data running through a company half-owned by a competitor, so many cut ties or significantly reduced contract size. Mercor was well positioned to capture the moment, having built the talent supply and matching machinery to meet the newfound demand.

Today, Mercor connects its customers with scientists, doctors, lawyers, software engineers, bankers, economists, and creative professionals who generate training data, write evaluation rubrics, build the reinforcement-learning environments, and benchmark how well models handle real professional work. Mercor charges an hourly finder's fee and a matching rate on top of what the experts earn, so its revenue grows directly with the work flowing through the network.

Mercor bootstrapped to $1 million in revenue run rate before raising from investors.

Then General Catalyst led a $3.6M seed in 2023. A year later, Benchmark led a $30M Series A at $250M post-money valuation. Five months after that, Felicis led a $100M Series B at $2 billion post-money valuation. And in October 2025, Felicis came back to lead again: a $350M Series C at a $10 billion post-money valuation.

Upon the Series C announcement, Mercor was reportedly at roughly $500 million in annualized revenue. Earlier this year, CEO Brendan Foody shared that Mercor had crossed $1 billion in ARR, roughly doubling the business in only a few months.

By his account, Mercor runs a talent pool in the millions, with 30,000–40,000+ experts actively working at any given time, collectively paid more than $3 million a day at around $100 an hour.

And the product keeps climbing the value chain. Mercor has shifted from static data labeling towards what Foody calls "agentic data," the environments, rubrics, and expert feedback loops that teach AI agents to do professional-level work.

As the capability of AI concentrates in the foundation models, we believe a lot of the lasting value will flow down to the infrastructure and data layers that feed them.

A few things make Mercor hard to copy:

1. A talent pool in the millions, where experts refer their friends and the next hire gets easier to find.
2. An AI matching system that sharpens with every project.
3. A growing library of training environments that's worth more with each customer.
4. APEX, its AI productivity benchmark, quietly makes Mercor the scorekeeper for the very labs it sells to.

Their plan is to push deeper into defensibility: grow the network, sharpen the matching, and pay contractors faster to position Mercor as the payroll and coordination layer for the entire AI training economy.

USVC holds a $2 million allocation in Mercor, invested at the company's Series C $10 billion post-money valuation.

The position is held through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) that sits directly on Mercor's cap table.

To be precise about what you could own with USVC: you would not own Mercor shares directly. You would own shares in USVC, the registered fund that holds this Mercor position alongside other private companies and emerging managers.

What you get is economic exposure, inside our portfolio, to one of the fastest-growing private companies in history.

Those who historically get into a company at Mercor's stage are big venture funds, endowments, and crossover funds writing eight-figure checks.

Individual investors (even accredited ones) almost never see a position like this before the company goes public. And by the time it does, most of the gains that happened while it was private have already been captured.

That's the access USVC intends to provide.

U.S. investors can get started with as little as $500. No accreditation required.

Learn more: usvc.com

Investors should carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, sales charges and expenses of USVC before investing. USVC's prospectus contains this and other information and may be obtained at http://usvc.com/prospectus or by calling +1 (844) 988-1720. Read the prospectus carefully before investing.

This communication is for informational purposes only, is not intended to be a recommendation for any investment or other advice of any kind and shall not constitute or imply any offer to purchase, sell or hold any security or to enter into or engage in any type of transaction. Any such offers will only be made pursuant to USVC's prospectus, which should be carefully reviewed before investing.

Investing in the USVC Venture Capital Access Fund involves significant risk, including the possible loss of principal. Venture capital investments are speculative, illiquid, and subject to a high degree of risk. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

USVC Venture Capital Access Fund is distributed by North Capital Private Securities (NCPS), member FINRA/SIPC. NCPS is not affiliated with USVC’s adviser or its affiliates.

Investing in USVC's shares involves substantial risk, including the potential loss of your entire investment. Shares are not listed on any exchange, are illiquid, and liquidity is limited to periodic repurchases at the discretion of the Board, which are not guaranteed. This investment is speculative and suitable only for long-term investors who can bear the risks of limited liquidity. Certain conflicts of interest involving USVC and its affiliates could impact USVC's investment returns and limit the flexibility of its investment policies. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Fees, expenses, and conflicts of interest may reduce returns.

USVC's shares have no history of public trading. You should not expect to be able to sell your shares other than through USVC's repurchase policy, regardless of how USVC performs. USVC does not intend to list its shares on any securities exchange during the continuous offering, and it does not expect a secondary market in the shares to develop.

USVC invests in private funds which are subject to certain risks including those related to illiquidity, indirect fees, valuation, limited operating histories and limited information regarding underlying investments. As a result of the foregoing, an investment in USVC's shares is not suitable for investors that require liquidity, other than liquidity provided through USVC's repurchase policy. The amount of distributions that USVC may pay, if any, is uncertain.