# Surge AI

> Surge AI is a San Francisco data annotation company that produces high-quality human-labeled datasets and RLHF feedback for the world's leading AI labs - OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta and Microsoft among them. Founded in 2020 by ex-Twitter and ex-Facebook ML engineer Edwin Chen, it bootstrapped to roughly $1.2B in annual revenue with around 110 employees and a labeler network reported near one million.

- **Founded:** 2020
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founders:** Edwin Chen (Founder & CEO)
- **Team size:** ~110 full-time employees; labeler network reported near 1,000,000
- **Products:** RLHF & Human Feedback, Data Annotation Platform, Model Evaluation & Red Teaming, RL Environments, DataAnnotation.tech
- **Notable:** Bootstrapped to roughly $1.2B in annual revenue with no outside funding for five years, Edwin Chen named to the TIME100 AI list in 2025, Built a labeler network reported near one million contributors

## Products & services

- **RLHF & Human Feedback** — Reinforcement learning from human feedback pipelines for frontier LLMs - rankings, rewrites, and adversarial probing by trained annotators.
- **Data Annotation Platform** — A managed labeling platform with WYSIWYG editors, custom labeling templates and a Python SDK for instructing expert annotators at scale.
- **Model Evaluation & Red Teaming** — Custom benchmarks, post-training evaluations and toxicity/safety reviews used by frontier labs and enterprises.
- **RL Environments** — Bespoke environments for training and stress-testing reinforcement learning agents.
- **DataAnnotation.tech** — Surge's contractor-facing brand for recruiting and managing its large labeler network.

## Achievements

- Bootstrapped to roughly $1.2B in annual revenue with no outside funding for five years
- Edwin Chen named to the TIME100 AI list in 2025
- Built a labeler network reported near one million contributors
- Powers RLHF pipelines at the most-watched AI labs in the world

## Latest updates

- **2025-07** — Reported funding discussions with Andreessen Horowitz, Warburg Pincus and TPG at a valuation between $15B and $25B.
- **2025-06** — Inc. profile reveals ~$1.2B revenue with only ~150 employees, still bootstrapped.
- **2025** — Edwin Chen featured on TIME100 AI.

## Links

- Website: https://surgehq.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/surge-ai
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/HelloSurgeAI
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/HelloSurgeAI/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/surge-ai
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-18