Micro1, a startup that was established only three years ago, recently announced that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has exceeded $100 million. This news is exciting because at the beginning of this year, the company's ARR was only $7 million. In September, Micro1 just completed a $35 million Series A funding round, with a valuation of $500 million.

Ali Ansari, founder and CEO of Micro1, said that the company is currently collaborating with several leading artificial intelligence laboratories, including Fortune 100 companies such as Microsoft. These companies are accelerating the training of large language models, and the demand for high-quality data has driven rapid market expansion. Ansari predicts that the market size will reach nearly $10 billion within the next two years from the current $10 to $15 billion.

With the dissolution of OpenAI and Google's deep learning team's partnership with Scale AI, Micro1 and other competitors such as Mercor and Surge have rapidly emerged. Although Micro1's ARR has grown quickly, it is still lower than Mercor's $450 million and Surge's projected $1.2 billion.

Ansari pointed out that Micro1's success lies in its ability to quickly recruit and evaluate domain experts. Micro1 was originally an AI recruitment company called Zara, focusing on matching engineers with software positions, and later transformed into a data training market. Now, Micro1 has begun developing two new business areas, which will reshape the economy of human data in the future.

Firstly, Fortune 1000 companies that are not AI-native will start building AI agents for internal workflows. Developing these agents requires systematic evaluation and testing, Ansari said, and this process highly depends on the assessment of human experts. Secondly, Micro1 is building the largest robot pre-training dataset in the world, collecting demonstrations of people's interactions with everyday items. This data will help robots operate reliably in home and office environments.

Currently, Micro1 still mainly gains growth from elite AI laboratories and AI-intensive enterprises. Ansari emphasized that the company is committed to ensuring fair compensation for experts while expanding its scale, keeping humans at the center of an industry focused on training machines.

Key points:

💰 Micro1's annual recurring revenue (ARR) has surged from $7 million to over $100 million, showing an astonishing growth rate.

🤖 The company is exploring two new markets: robot pre-training datasets and enterprise AI agent development, with great future potential.

👩‍🏫 Micro1 is committed to high-quality human data evaluation and collaborates with major AI laboratories to expand its market share.