The artificial intelligence (AI) industry has witnessed unprecedented growth in recent years, with numerous companies scaling at an incredible pace. One such company is Micro1, a three-year-old startup that has experienced a remarkable surge in revenue, crossing $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) from a mere $7 million at the beginning of the year. This impressive growth can be attributed to the increasing demand for high-quality human data in training AI models, particularly in the realm of large language models.
Micro1’s success can be linked to its ability to recruit and evaluate domain experts quickly, a skill it developed during its initial days as an AI recruiter. The company’s tool interviews and vets applicants seeking expert roles on the platform, ensuring that only the best talent is provided to leading AI labs, including Microsoft, and Fortune 100 companies. This expertise has enabled Micro1 to establish itself as a key player in the industry, alongside competitors like Mercor and Surge.
The market for human data is expected to expand significantly, from $10-15 billion currently to nearly $100 billion within two years. This growth will be driven by the increasing adoption of AI technology across various industries, including non-AI-native Fortune 1000 enterprises that will begin building AI agents for internal workflows, support operations, finance, and industry-specific tasks. The development of these agents requires systematic evaluation, which depends heavily on human experts evaluating AI behavior at scale.
Another area that is expected to contribute to the growth of the human data market is robotics pre-training, which requires high-quality, human-generated demonstrations of everyday physical tasks. Micro1 is already working on building the world’s largest robotics pre-training dataset, collecting demonstrations from hundreds of generalists recording object interactions in their homes. This data will be essential for robotics companies to develop systems that can reliably operate in homes and offices.
Micro1’s CEO, Ali Ansari, believes that the company’s early move into robotics data and enterprise agent development, in addition to scaling its specialized reinforcement learning (RL) environments, will help it capture additional market share as the data wars intensify. The company is focused on scaling responsibly, paying experts well, and keeping people at the center of an industry built on training machines. With thousands of experts across hundreds of domains, Micro1 is well-positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for human data.
The company’s experts, who include Harvard professors and Stanford PhDs, earn close to $100 an hour, and are working on a wide range of projects, from highly technical fields to surprisingly offline disciplines. The sheer volume and range of roles are expanding into areas that were previously not considered relevant to language model training, including offline and less technical fields. This shift is expected to have a significant impact on the industry, as companies like Micro1 continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with human data.
As the AI industry continues to evolve, it is clear that human data will play an increasingly important role in the development of AI models. Companies like Micro1 are at the forefront of this trend, providing high-quality human data to leading AI labs and enterprises. With its impressive growth and expanding range of services, Micro1 is well-positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for human data and establish itself as a leader in the industry. The future of AI is likely to be shaped by the ability of companies like Micro1 to provide high-quality human data, and it will be exciting to see how this industry continues to evolve in the coming years.
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