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On December 4, AI data service provider Micro1 announced that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has exceeded $100 million, growing more than 14 times from $7 million at the beginning of the year, becoming the fastest-growing AI supply chain company this year. The company also disclosed its latest valuation of $500 million, transforming from zero to a unicorn in three years, with founder Ali Ansari only 24 years old.
From recruitment tools to "AI Expert Cloud"
Micro1 initially launched an AI interviewer named Zara, which automatically matches positions for engineers; in 2023, it shifted to the "human feedback reinforcement learning" track, and the platform now manages thousands of interdisciplinary experts - from Harvard professors to offline craftsmen - providing annotation, evaluation, and RL training data for labs such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft, with an average hourly wage close to $100.
Synchronous Expansion of Three Business Lines
1. Large Model RLHF: Helping top laboratories build reward models, adversarial testing, and red team evaluations, accounting for 70% of current revenue.
2. Enterprise Agent Evaluation: Building a "model-score-fine-tune-monitor" loop for non-AI-native Fortune 1000 companies, Ansari predicts that the budget proportion for this product will rise from 0% to 25%.
3. Robot Pre-training Data: Recruiting hundreds of home users to record daily operation videos, claiming to be building the world's largest robot pre-training dataset, used for strategy learning in household and office scenarios.
Competitive Landscape and Market Size
- Competitor Mercor is reported to have ARR over $450 million, Surge reaches $1.2 billion, while Micro1's scale is still small but its growth rate leads.
- Ansari believes the "human data" market will expand from the current $10-15 billion to hundreds of billions, with robot and agent evaluation being the main growth drivers.
Funding and Roadmap
The company completed a $35 million Series A round in September 2024, with sufficient cash to support expansion before its IPO in 2026; the next step will be to launch the "Expert Cloud" API, allowing any developer to instantly access "Harvard-level" human annotations, while exploring a hybrid solution of synthetic data plus real verification to reduce marginal costs.
Industry Insight: Data is Computing Power, Humans are Chips
As GPT-5 and Gemini 3 enter the RL Scaling phase, the demand for high-quality human feedback from top laboratories is increasing exponentially. Micro1 rapidly scaled up through its "high-price expert acquisition + scenario decentralization" strategy, proving that "human training AI" is upgrading from outsourcing services to AI infrastructure. Whether it can continue to expand its expert network and maintain data quality will be key to its journey towards a $1 billion ARR.