Mercor — AI supply-chain exposure

Mercor runs a marketplace that connects domain experts, in law, medicine, finance and beyond, to AI labs that need specialist training data and model evaluations. It sits in the applications-and-services layer as a data supplier, monetizing expert human judgment as a raw input to frontier training rather than building models itself.

Its structural hook is the shift in what limits model quality. As the easy gains from scraped web text fade, progress increasingly depends on expert-labelled data and rigorous evaluation, which is exactly what Mercor sources. That places it in the same picks-and-shovels position as other data vendors: real exposure to lab data budgets, but a role that lives beside the value chain rather than inside its compute-and-silicon core. The model reads its centrality as modest.