The doctors and lawyers who grade AI answers are now a half-billion-dollar business — and this one grew fivefold in eight months
Micro1 told TechCrunch on 20 August that its gross annual run rate has climbed from $100 million to $500 million in eight months. The gross figure is not the company's money. Like others in the trade it contracts domain experts — doctors, lawyers, scientists — and passes most of the fee to them, keeping roughly 60 to 70 percent, which puts its net run rate between $150 million and $200 million. Off-the-shelf datasets sold to more than one customer carry margins of 80 to 90 percent. The company is four years old, was founded by Ali Ansari, and began life as an AI recruiting tool before pivoting when data-labelling firms started using its platform to vet annotators. Its work now spans expert grading of model outputs for reinforcement learning, synthetic data generation, and a robotics pre-training set built by paying hundreds of ordinary people to film themselves handling everyday objects at home. It raised a Series A at a $500 million valuation last September. For scale, rival Mercor is at roughly $2 billion of gross annualised revenue and Handshake at $1 billion.
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