Acquisition
Feb 2026Mercor acquired Sepal AI in February 2026; Sepal's website states the company has been acquired by Mercor and is marked closed.
SourceCompany research
Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Overview
Sepal AI was a San Francisco-based, YC Summer 2024 data-development company for AI labs and enterprises. It built a cloud-native agent dataset factory combining human experts, synthetic augmentation, quality control, benchmarks, evaluations, and RL environments; the company was acquired by Mercor in February 2026.
Primary product
Cloud-native agent dataset factory for training data, custom benchmarks, evaluations, and RL environments
Founded
2024
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Team size
60-70
Industry
Technology, Information and Internet
Sub-industry
AI data development / evaluation platform
Offices
San Francisco, California, United States
Distributed workforce across 7 countries
Business model
B2B software/platform
managed services for data operations and model evaluation
expert marketplace / human-in-the-loop services
Funding
Stage
Seed
Total raised
$625K
Latest round
Seed · Jan 2025
People & investors
Work & culture
Frontier-ambition, quality-and-clarity, end-to-end enablement, operational excellence, and human-first; low-ego and execution-oriented.
Visa sponsorship
Limited
Compensation
Public employee comp shown on a YC job posting included $130k-$180k base salary plus 0.20%-0.90% equity for a senior software engineer. Public expert-hub materials also show hourly expert rates around $70-$112/hr, plus flexible hours and performance bonuses.
Benefits
Flexible PTO
Health insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Performance bonuses for experts
Frontier-tech salons
Peer collaboration opportunities
Flexible hours for expert network work
Product & market
Pricing
Custom enterprise/project-based pricing; expert work appears billed by hour for contractors.
Differentiators
- —20k+ network of PhD-level experts and researchers
- —Cloud-native agent dataset factory
- —End-to-end support across training data, evals, red-teaming, and RL environments
- —Human data plus synthetic augmentation in one platform
- —SOC 2 certified
- —Domain-specific benchmarks and pre-launch testing
Technology
Python
SQL
TypeScript
Docker
Kubernetes
Terraform
Databricks
Snowflake
Google Cloud
OpenAI
PostgreSQL
React
FastAPI
AWS
GitHub
Vercel
Prometheus
Grafana
Kibana
TensorFlow
Customers
OpenAI
Anthropic
Fortune 500 enterprises
top AI research labs
AI labs and enterprises
Competitors
Scale AI
Surge AI
Labelbox
Turing
Mercor
Scale & contact
Estimated revenue
around $2M ARR (third-party estimate; figures vary across sources)
Estimated monthly visits
8.1K
Traffic estimate as of Jun 2026
Signals & risks
Latest news
Orrick · Feb 2026
Mercor acquired Sepal AI in February 2026 and described it as a data-development platform for training data, benchmarks, and RL environments.
LinkedIn · Jun 2025
Sepal AI announced a talent-search product aimed at speeding recruitment of experts for training, evaluations, and model testing.
Y Combinator · May 2025
YC highlighted Sepal AI's role in pre-launch testing for Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet, reinforcing its position in frontier-model evaluation and safety work.
Startup Intros · Sep 2024
A third-party funding note reported a $500K seed round for Sepal AI in September 2024.
LinkedIn · Aug 2024
Sepal AI announced its launch and described its frontier-data and tooling platform for AI engineering and research teams.
Jobs and careers at Sepal AI
0 jobs at Sepal AI
No open positions
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