Who is already there · 22 profiles
The people you would be competing with
Profiles of the operators that matter, with what they raised, what they are worth on paper, what they actually keep, and where the number is a leak rather than a filing. The full register of everyone else — including the dead — is in the capital register.
| Company | Vertical | Raised | Last valuation | Revenue | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mediamaxxing | Creators and UGC | None found | n/a | Not disclosed. Self-reports $1M+ paid to creators, lifetime | Active, small |
| Mercor | Expert data for frontier labs | ~$484M through Series C | $10B (Oct 2025); ~$20B reported in talks, July 2026 — no confirmed close | $2.0B annualised GROSS run rate (June 2026); $614M gross in H1 2026. Net is roughly a third of that. | Active; fastest-growing in the category; hit by an April 2026 data breach that cost it the Meta relationship |
| Surge AI | Expert data for frontier labs | $0 until 2025; sought up to $1B in July 2025 — no confirmed close | Reported $15B (Reuters) or $25B (Bloomberg) — sources conflict and no close is confirmed | ~$1.2B annualised 2024, basis not stated but almost certainly GROSS. No credible 2025 or 2026 figure. | Active, profitable since launch; Edwin Chen reportedly owns ~75% |
| Whop | Creators and UGC | ~$267M | $1.6B (Feb 2026) | $142M net annualised (Oct 2025), from $56M net (2024). ~$2.67B cumulative GMV | Active |
| Scale AI | Expert data for frontier labs | ~$1.6B equity, plus Meta's $14.3B for a 49% non-voting stake | $29B (June 2025, on the Meta investment); $13.8B in 2023 | $870M in 2024; ~$2B annualised 2025 per one estimate; company guiding to 'surpass $1B' in 2026 — the bases are incompatible and the real figure is unknown. Gross margin '50%+'. | Active but destabilised; customers fled post-Meta; 200 FTEs and ~500 contractors cut July 2025; pivoted to defence and enterprise |
| ShopMy | Creators and UGC | ~$175M | $1.5B (Oct 2025) | >$1B GMV (2025); $80M net revenue (2025), from $27M (2024) and $4M (2023) | Active |
| Handshake AI | Expert data for frontier labs | $435M (last priced round: $200M Series F, January 2022, Coatue + Valiant Peregrine) | $3.5B (2025 mark); $3.3B at the Series F — the mark predates all the AI revenue | ~$1.0B GROSS annualised for the AI arm (April 2026), ~$300M net after contractor payments; ~$1.10B gross group-wide, ~$450M net | Active; ~100 US roles cut in the legacy recruiting business; contractors publicly allege withheld pay |
| micro1 | Expert data for frontier labs | ~$38–42M (pre-seed $3.3M Aug 2023; $35M Series A Sept 2025) | $500M (September 2025); a higher round was reportedly being raised in August 2026, terms not established | $500M GROSS run rate (August 2026), up from $100M ARR in December 2025. Net reported at $150–200M. | Active; fastest-growing of the small caps |
| Turing | Expert data for frontier labs | ~$225M primary | $2.2B (March 2025); $1.1B (December 2021) | $300M+ annualised 2024, and profitable. A staffing spread, so the figure is effectively GROSS. Nothing found for 2025 or 2026. | Active; pivoting from developer staffing to lab data and evals |
| Invisible Technologies | Expert data for frontier labs | ~$144M | $2B+ (September 2025); ~$500M in early 2024 | $134M in 2024, +123% YoY, with ~$15M EBITDA (11% margin). Basis is closer to NET than the marketplace names — it employs its operators. | Active; CEO Matthew Fitzpatrick since January 2025; agreed to acquire WeCP in March 2026 |
| Appen | Expert data for frontier labs | Public company; an A$60M placement in 2024 is unverified | A$330M market cap (28 August 2026) — roughly 0.9x revenue, computed AUD-on-AUD against A$361.9M TTM. Peak was ~US$4.3B in August 2020 | US$230.8M FY2025 operating revenue (audited), 40.3% gross margin, US$12.2M underlying EBITDA. NET — Appen employs or contracts its crowd and books the work, not a payout marketplace | Survivor, shrunken. Loss-making every year since 2022; stabilised and growing again on an AI-data tailwind |
| Mechanize | Expert data for frontier labs | $9.1M seed | ~$500M at the seed; Google talks reported at $1.5B+ (August 2026) — no close confirmed | Not disclosed. There may not be a meaningful revenue line at all. | In reported licence-and-hire talks with Google as of August 2026 |
| Prolific | Expert data for frontier labs | ~$33.4M (£25M Series A, July 2023, Partech and Oxford Science Enterprises; earlier YC seed) | Not disclosed; no recent mark | ~$350M annualised as of April 2026 — a Sacra ESTIMATE, not a disclosure. Prolific books its platform fee, so this is closer to NET than most names here. | Active; pivoted from academic research panels into AI evals, RLHF and red-teaming |
| Paraform | Recruiting | $65M | Never disclosed | Never disclosed; ~$21M lifetime net implied | Active |
| Juicebox | Recruiting | $36M | Never disclosed | $10M+ ARR at Series A | Active |
| Toptal | Recruiting | $1.4M (2012), nothing since | Never disclosed | ~$167M (2023) — third-party estimate, unverified. GROSS: Toptal bills an hourly rate and pays the freelancer less, so this is bill rate, not margin | Active and independent |
| Triplebyte and Hired | Recruiting | Triplebyte ~$50M; Hired $132.7M | Triplebyte $135M (PitchBook estimate); Hired ~$500M (2020) | Hired $11.5M (2021); Triplebyte never disclosed | Dead / absorbed |
| Andela | Recruiting | ~$330M (Sacra) or ~$381M across 8 rounds (Grokipedia) — sources disagree | $1.5B (SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Sept 2021) | Never disclosed | Active but quiet; three pivots, four rounds of cuts |
| Gray Swan AI | Evals and red-teaming | ~$45M+ | ~$200M post-money (May 2026) | Not disclosed | Active — cited in 11 frontier model system cards |
| Distyl AI | Forward-deployed engineering | ~$202M | $1.8B post-money (Series B, Sept 2025) | ~$31M ARR 2025 [WEAK — GetLatka estimate; $24M 2024] | Active — 111 employees |
| GLG | Expert networks | PE-owned; capital structure not established | Never disclosed — filed an S-1 in Oct 2021 and never listed | >$400M NET [single industry-blog source]; the S-1 gives $589.1M for FY2020 | Active, private, PE-owned. Market share fell from 51% to 24% over a decade |
| SF Compute | Compute brokerage | $40M disclosed | $300M post-money | Not disclosed | Active — spot-and-forward market for GPU clusters |
Creators and UGC
Mediamaxxing
A small, self-serve pay-per-view creator platform with no published legal entity, no press, no named clients and no funding. Included to correct the record, not because it leads anything.
Whop
The clipping marketplace layer. $200M from Tether at $1.6B, $2.67B of cumulative GMV, and a 10% fee on the payouts that make it the default venue for pay-per-view campaigns.
ShopMy
Creator affiliate infrastructure, and the cleanest worked example of the gross-versus-net anchoring gap: >$1B of GMV, $80M of net revenue, a $1.5B mark.
Expert data for frontier labs
Mercor
The fastest-growing broker of expert human labour to AI labs — $2B gross run rate on a 33% gross margin and 91% revenue from foundation-model companies.
Surge AI
Bootstrapped to over $1B of revenue with 130 employees and no outside capital — and the one company whose valuation nobody can pin down.
Scale AI
Took $14.3B from Meta for 49% of itself and lost most of its frontier-lab book within weeks — the cleanest natural experiment in why neutrality is the product.
Handshake AI
A decade-old campus network that already owned the PhDs its competitors were recruiting — zero to $1B gross in fifteen months, on a valuation nobody has re-marked.
micro1
5x'd in eight months to a $500M gross run rate, and is the only vendor claiming 80–90% gross margin on anything — by reselling the same dataset more than once.
Turing
A remote-developer staffing firm that repositioned as a lab data provider — profitable, $2.2B marked, and with no hard revenue number since 2024.
Invisible Technologies
An operations-as-a-service business that discloses a real profit figure — $134M revenue, $15M EBITDA — and is marked at 15x for it.
Appen
The only pure-play with audited numbers, and a 97% drawdown from peak — the base rate for what a concentrated data vendor is worth when one hyperscaler leaves.
Mechanize
$9.1M of seed capital, ~35 people, no disclosed revenue, and reported Google talks at $1.5B+ — the licence-and-hire template for selling environments instead of hours.
Prolific
The only company in the vertical that publishes its take rate — 42.8% on top of participant pay — and the best public anchor for what this spread actually is.
Recruiting
Paraform
The archetype of the recruiter-side marketplace: pays independent recruiters ~70% of a placement fee and keeps the rest. $65M raised, $50M paid out, and no independent evidence of any of it.
Juicebox
PeopleGPT: semantic search over 800M+ profiles at $99–179 a month. The tooling end of the recruiting market, and the price floor under everything in it.
Toptal
Raised $1.4M in 2012 and nothing since. Every VC-funded competitor from its cohort is dead, absorbed or silent. It is the strongest single data point in the atlas.
Triplebyte and Hired
Two autopsies, one disease: both made candidates the scarce side, both diluted quality to hit growth targets, and both had revenue that had to be re-won on every transaction.
Andela
Trained juniors and rented them out, then deleted the training when demand moved to seniors. The pivot to a marketplace removed the only proprietary asset and left a commodity staffing spread.