AI hiring platform Mercor backed by Dorsey, Peter Thiel in $30 million fundraise

(Reuters) - Mercor said on Thursday it raised $30 million in a funding round, that included entrepreneur Jack Dorsey and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, putting the AI hiring platform's valuation at $250 million.

The Series A funding round was led by venture capital firm Benchmark's Victor Lazarte and Bill Gurley, and also saw participation from Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, both of whom are OpenAI board members.

The round made Mercor the latest addition to privately owned AI companies attracting major investments to scale their operations. Earlier this month, Safe Superintelligence, co-founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, raised $1 billion in cash.

Mercor uses artificial intelligence to enable recruiters to hire candidates who are working at companies such as Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia. It said it has added more than 300,000 people to its candidate pool.

(Reporting by Rishi Kant in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)