Micro1 announced late last week that it secured a $35 million Series A round that valued the company at $500 million, with 24-year-old CEO Ali Ansari leading the startup. The funding was led by 01 Advisors, a venture capital firm co-founded by former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and former Twitter Chief Operating Officer Adam Bain.
Bain will also join the company's board alongside Joshua Browder, the founder and CEO of AI legal startup DoNotPay. "Really, the only way models are now learning is through net new human data. Micro1 is at the core of providing that data to all frontier labs, while moving at speeds I've never seen before," Bain told TechCrunch.
Don't Miss:
- ‘Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. You can invest today for just $0.30/share.
- 7 Million Gamers Already Trust Gameflip With Their Digital Assets — Now You Can Own a Stake in the Platform
A Startup Growing From $7M to $50M Revenue in Months
Micro1, founded in 2022, competes directly with Scale AI and other players in the training data sector, TechCrunch reported. The company's business focuses on connecting contractors, or as it calls them, experts, with leading AI labs and enterprises for labeling and training tasks.
Ansari told TechCrunch that Micro1 has grown its annual recurring revenue from $7 million at the start of 2025 to $50 million, a sharp rise in less than a year. Clients reportedly already include Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and multiple Fortune 100 companies.
While that revenue still trails rivals like Mercor, with more than $450 million, and Surge AI, which reported $1.2 billion in 2024, Ansari said Micro1's growth pace and adoption rate by major labs are promising signs.
Trending: If there was a new fund backed by Jeff Bezos offering a 7-9% target yield with monthly dividends would you invest in it?
The AI Recruiter Called Zara and a Market Shift Away From Scale AI
Micro1's competitive edge comes from its proprietary AI recruiter known as Zara, which interviews candidates and helps vet their expertise before connecting them to projects. Ansari said the company has already recruited thousands of experts, including professors from Stanford and Harvard, with plans to onboard hundreds more each week.
The change in the market comes after Meta (NASDAQ:META) invested $14 billion into Scale AI and hired its CEO, prompting concerns among other AI labs about potential conflicts of interest. OpenAI and Google were among those that said they would move away from Scale AI.
This reshuffling has created new opportunities for startups like Micro1, which aim to capture business from AI labs needing human-labeled data at scale, TechCrunch reported.
See Also: Backed by $300M+ in Assets and Microsoft's Climate Fund, Farmland LP Opens Vital Farmland III to Accredited Investors
Micro1's Long-Term Vision for Human Intelligence Platforms
Ansari framed the company's broader mission in philosophical terms, writing in Micro1's statement, "Where should humanity spend its time? At Micro1, we believe this is the most important question of our generation."
He added that the company's ultimate vision is to build "the world's best human intelligence platform, where every person is matched with the work they'll find the most meaning in."
Beyond traditional labeling, Micro1 is also expanding into new services called "environments," which are virtual workspaces used to train AI agents on simulated tasks, TechCrunch reported.
With the backing of Twitter's former executives and a fast-growing base of enterprise clients, Micro1 may become a key supplier of training data in a market where demand for high-quality human input shows no sign of slowing.
Read Next: The ECG Hasn't Changed in 100 Years — This AI Upgrade Could Help Detect Heart Disease Years Earlier
Image: Shutterstock
