# micro1

> micro1 is a San Francisco AI data company that recruits and vets domain experts, turns their work into training and evaluation data, and helps AI labs and enterprises measure how models and agents behave in realistic settings. Its stack spans Zara for expert vetting, Realm for frontier evaluations and reinforcement-learning environments, Cortex for production agent reliability, and robotics data collection and annotation.

- **Founded:** 2022
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, United States
- **Founders:** Ali Ansari (Founder and CEO)
- **Team size:** The supplied company record lists approximately 7,800 people, likely including a large distributed expert workforce; public sources do not clearly separate employees from contractors.
- **Products:** Zara, Realm, Flow, Merit, Cortex
- **Notable:** Raised a $35 million Series A led by 01 Advisors at a reported $500 million valuation in September 2025., Reported growing annual recurring revenue from roughly $7 million at the start of 2025 to more than $100 million by December 2025., Ran a randomized field test involving about 37,000 junior-developer applicants; candidates selected by Zara passed final interviews at 54% versus 34% for the résumé-screen control.

## Products & services

- **Zara** — An AI recruiter that runs structured, role-specific interviews to source and vet domain experts for data work and other opportunities.
- **Realm** — A data engine for AI labs combining frontier evaluations, reinforcement-learning environments and human-in-the-loop data production across more than 100 fields.
- **Flow** — A work environment where domain experts create, review and deliver complex datasets, including configurable human-and-machine annotation pipelines.
- **Merit** — A performance dashboard that tracks expert-data quality, velocity, reliability, error rates and cost per task.
- **Cortex** — An evaluation and monitoring system for AI agents that uses real workflows and expert judgment to diagnose failures and produce targeted improvement data.
- **Robotics data services** — Expert demonstrations, multimodal capture, annotation, dataset enrichment and controlled deployment labs for embodied AI and physical policy models.
- **Company data partnerships** — A program that turns participating companies' anonymized operational workflows into structured training datasets.

## Achievements

- Raised a $35 million Series A led by 01 Advisors at a reported $500 million valuation in September 2025.
- Reported growing annual recurring revenue from roughly $7 million at the start of 2025 to more than $100 million by December 2025.
- Ran a randomized field test involving about 37,000 junior-developer applicants; candidates selected by Zara passed final interviews at 54% versus 34% for the résumé-screen control.
- The same recruiting study reported 44% fewer human interviews were needed per hirable applicant.
- Expanded its data engine beyond language-model training into real-world agent evaluations and robotics demonstration and annotation pipelines.
- Built expert-data and evaluation workflows spanning more than 100 domains, including coding, medicine, law, finance, STEM, vision-language and audio.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — Published research on Flow, its configurable robotics annotation engine, reporting fewer human corrections than a single-pass baseline in a small five-episode evaluation.
- **2026-06** — Outlined a four-stage contextual evaluation loop for diagnosing and improving AI agents that plateau in production.
- **2026-02** — Convened a public panel with leaders from General Motors and Serve Robotics on the data layer behind autonomy.
- **2026-01** — Announced a policy limiting work to AI labs in the United States and allied countries.
- **2025-12** — Founder Ali Ansari told TechCrunch that annual recurring revenue had surpassed $100 million.
- **2025-09** — Closed a $35 million Series A led by 01 Advisors at a reported $500 million valuation; Adam Bain joined the board.

## Links

- Website: https://www.micro1.ai/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/micro1/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/micro1_ai
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@micro1_ai
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/micro1.ai/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/micro1
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-13