Micro1, a competitor to expand the scope of artificial intelligence, collects money with a rating of $ 500 million

Micro1, a three -year -old start -up company that helps artificial intelligence companies find human contractors and manage signs of data and training it, a 3 $ 35 million financing round of $ 500 million. The O1 Advisors tour, the Investment Capital Company, was led by Dick Costolo and Adam Payne, former CEO and Operations Director of Twitter.

The start starting is one of many companies looking to fill the gap in the data market created by the recent changes that include Scale AI. After a dead investment 14 billion dollars On the AI ​​scale and rented its CEO, AI LABS including Openai and Google They said they planned Cut ties With the startup, it is assumed that their research can end in the hands of Meta. (AI scale Deny It shares secret information with Meta as part of its partnership).

However, AI LABS still needs these data services, and startups like Micro1 aims to capture the recession.

Micro1 CEO Ali Ansari – only 24 -year -old – Techcrunch that his company is working with the leadership of AI Labs, including Microsoft, as well as many Fortune 100 companies. Ansari said that Micro1 now generates $ 50 million of repeated annual revenues (ARR), up from $ 7 million at the beginning of 2025.

This is still far from big competitors such as MERCOR, which is born More than 450 million dollars In Arr, the height, which was said to have brought $ 1.2 billion in 2024. However, the growth and adoption of Micro1 appears to be growing between artificial intelligence laboratories.

As part of the new financing, Micro1 also adds Bain to its board of directors, along with Joshua Browder, founder and director of the AI ​​Donotpay Legal Assistant.

“The only way the models learn is now through the new clear human data. Micro1 is at the heart of the provision of that data for all border laboratories, while moving at speeds that I have not seen before,” Payne said in a statement to Techcrunch.

Reuters previously Details reported From Micro1 donation efforts.

All of these companies – micro1, height, fun, and Scale AI – provide artificial intelligence laboratories with a large base of human contractors who can name and create data to train artificial intelligence. It has become a decisive service, companies like Openai, Meta, and Google need to build advanced AI models.

Scale AI was the first to dominate this space, with the initial insight that could push relatively little for contractors with low skills all over the world to help naming data to train on the artificial intelligence model. However, ANSAri says that the demands of artificial intelligence laboratories have turned in recent years, and that companies now need signs of high-quality data from field experts-such as the top software engineers, doctors and professional writers-to improve artificial intelligence models. The difficult part of the recruitment of these types of people has become.

This led to the construction of an artificial intelligence recruiter, Zara, who is conducting interviews and candidates who are applying to work as one of the company’s contractors, or as Ansari calls them, experts. Micro1 says Zara has employed thousands of experts – including professors from Stanford and Harvard – and that the company plans to add hundreds every week.

The artificial intelligence training data market appears to change again. Now, many AI laboratories are interested in working with startups to develop “environments” – virtual work spaces that can be used to train artificial intelligence agents on simulation tasks. Ansari says Micro1 is building new offers in the environments space to meet this request.

Fortunately for startups such as Micro1, artificial intelligence laboratories appear to be working with multiple training data providers. The nature of the work is that it is difficult for any one company to deal with all AI laboratory data needs. This means that there are a lot of business, at least, at the present time.