ai-talent
(5)
Upwork has a new job: making AI hire humans
The freelance marketplace built a business around finding people who could do the work. Now it must prove that AI will send enough new work their way.
Brendan Foody
Brendan Foody is the 22-year-old co-founder and CEO of Mercor, the AI talent and data company that became a $10 billion decacorn in under two years. A Georgetown dropout and former Thiel Fellow from Menlo Park, California, Foody co-founded Mercor with high school debate teammates Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha at a São Paulo hackathon in early 2023. Mercor connects AI labs — including OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic — with domain experts (scientists, doctors, lawyers, bankers) who train frontier AI models through human feedback, growing from $1M to $500M in annual run rate within 17 months and making Foody one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires.
Surya Midha
Surya Midha is a 22-year-old co-founder and Chairman of Mercor, the AI-powered talent platform valued at $10 billion. A Thiel Fellow, national debate champion, and Georgetown dropout, Midha co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon into a company paying 30,000+ contractors over $1.5 million daily, matching elite human intelligence with AI labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. In 2026, he became one of the youngest people ever to appear on the Forbes World's Billionaires List with a net worth of $2.2 billion.
Turing
Turing is a $2.2 billion AGI infrastructure company that bridges the global talent gap in AI development. Founded in 2018 by Stanford AI alumni Jonathan Siddharth and Vijay Krishnan, Turing operates across two core missions: supplying frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic with expert human talent for coding, STEM, and reasoning data; and building production-grade AI systems for Fortune 500 enterprises. With a network spanning 4 million developers across 140+ countries, a fine-tuning platform called ALAN, and $334 million raised in total funding, Turing has grown into one of the fastest-scaling companies at the intersection of talent and artificial intelligence.
Ryan Batra
Ryan Batra is the VP, Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most influential deep-tech venture firms. A career talent architect with over a decade in hypergrowth tech, he spent six years building DoorDash's technical and executive recruiting machine through multiple phases of explosive expansion, then led recruiting at Lime and OpenStore before landing at Khosla. Now he helps founders across KV's portfolio - spanning AI, biotech, space, and climate - hire the engineers, researchers, and leaders who make bold ideas real. He's placed 500+ engineers and leaders. His philosophy: talent is one of the most powerful forms of leverage a founder has.