Micro1, a three -year -old start -up that helps AI companies find and manage human contractors for data tag and education, has compiled a $ 35 million financing round that appreciates the company for $ 500 million. The round was led by O1 Advisors, a venture capital company founded by Dick Costolo and Adam Bain, former CEO and COO for Twitter.
Start -up is one of many companies that want to fill the gap in the data market created by the recent changes involving scale AI. After Meta invested $ 14 billion in the scale of ai and hired its CEO, AI laboratories including Openai and Google said they planned to cut ties with startup, presumably over concern that their research could end in Meta’s hands. (Scale AI denies that it shares confidential information with Meta as part of its partnership).
However, AI laboratories still need these data services, and startups like micro1 are aiming to pick up the slack.
Micro1 CEO Ali Ansari – who is just 24 years old – says TechCrunch that his company has worked with leading AI laboratories, including Microsoft, as well as several Fortune 100 companies. Ansari said Micro1 now generates $ 50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), up from $ 7 million at the beginning of 2025.
It is still far from major competitors like Mercor, which generates more than $ 450 million in Arrem, and Surge, which reportedly brought in $ 1.2 billion by 2024.
As part of the new funding, Micro1 also adds Bain to his board of directors together with Joshua Browder, founder and CEO of AI Legal Assistant Donotpay.
“Really the only way models now learn is through net new human data. Micro1 is the core of providing this data to all Frontier Labs while moving at speeds I’ve never seen before,” Bain said in a statement to Techcrunch.
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Reuters reported previous details of Micro1’s Fundraising effort.
All of these companies – Micro1, Surge, Mercor and Scale AI – supply AI laboratories with access to a large base of human contractors who can feel and generate data for AI training. It has become an important service that companies like Openai, Anthropic, Meta and Google need to build groundbreaking AI models.
Scale AI was first to dominate this space with the initial insight that it could pay relatively little too low-skilled contractors around the world to help label AI model training data. Ansari, however, says the requirements of AI-laboratories have been changed in recent years and that companies now need high quality data branding from domain experts, such as senior software engineers, doctors and professional writers to improve their AI models. The hard part was recruiting these types of people.
This prompted Micro1 to build his AI recruiter, Zara, who interviews and veterinarians who are applying to work as one of the company’s contractors or as Ansari calls them experts. Micro1 says Zara has recruited thousands of experts – including Professors from Stanford and Harvard – and that the company is planning to add hundreds more every week.
The market for AI training data seems to change again. Now many AI laboratories are interested in working with startups to develop “environments” -virtual work areas that can be used to train AI agents on simulated tasks. Ansari says Micro1 is building new offers in the environmental area to meet this requirement.
Fortunately for startups like micro1, AI Labs looks to work with multiple educational data providers. The nature of the company is such that it is difficult for a single company to handle all of an AI Laboratory’s Data Head. This means that at least there are plenty of business to walk around for now.