Nvidia Interested in AI Startup Mercor after Multimillion-Dollar Data Orders

Published: August 20, 2026 – 08:08 UTC

Nvidia is considering investing in the AI startup Mercor.
The latter has already been valued at $20 billion, twice the figure from October last year.
The choice is attributed to a sharp surge in demand for AI data.

Nvidia is in talks to invest in the AI startup Mercor, which specializes in human-in-the-loop data preparation, as part of a new funding round that could value the company at $20 billion. The Information reported this. If the deal goes through, Mercor’s valuation would double compared with October 2025, when the startup was valued at $10 billion.

According to the outlet, venture firm General Catalyst, which has already invested in Mercor, is in talks to lead the new round. The exact size of Nvidia’s potential investment is currently unknown.

Nvidia’s interest in Mercor is linked to a sharp increase in the company’s need for high-quality data to train its own artificial intelligence models, including the open Nemotron lineup.

Nvidia Pays for Data to Train AI

Mercor specializes in bringing in professionals to evaluate and prepare data in areas such as law, finance, and science. While the bulk of the startup’s revenue previously came from developers of closed AI models, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, its collaboration with Nvidia has expanded rapidly.

In the previous quarter alone, Nvidia paid Mercor tens of millions of dollars for data prepared by domain experts. According to the company, Mercor’s materials were used in the two latest releases of Nemotron models.

To service this order, Mercor formed a dedicated team that is largely focused on working with Nvidia.

At the same time, the startup’s financial metrics are also growing rapidly. In June, its annualized gross revenue reached $2 billion, doubling compared with the figure at the beginning of 2026.

However, Nvidia does not rely solely on human-prepared data. To train Nemotron, the company also actively uses AI-generated synthetic data, as well as data collected from developers’ interactions with Nemotron models via the OpenRouter platform.

In addition to Mercor, Nvidia sources data for model training from Turing, Scale AI, and its own in-house operations. The company also previously participated in Scale AI’s 2024 funding round, after which the startup was valued at $14 billion.

Mercor Fits into Nvidia’s Investment Boom

A potential investment in Mercor is part of Nvidia’s broader expansion of venture activity. The company is increasingly investing not only in hardware makers, but also across various segments of the AI ecosystem.

In the quarter that ended in April 2026, Nvidia allocated $18.6 billion to private investments and infrastructure funds. That is more than the company invested over the entire previous year.

Among Nvidia’s major deals are $2 billion investments in specialized cloud infrastructure operators CoreWeave and Nebius, as well as in optical component manufacturers Lumentum and Coherent.

Mercor, founded just three years ago, has already raised about $520 million from investors, including Benchmark and Felicis. In October 2025, it was valued at $10 billion.

At the same time, Nvidia is strengthening its presence in large-scale AI projects. Previously, the company disclosed ownership of nearly 123 million SpaceX shares worth about $21 billion as of the end of June 2026. This came as SpaceX made Nvidia its exclusive supplier of AI compute for its data centers.

Nvidia is also in talks about potentially providing $250 billion in financial guarantees for OpenAI’s large-scale project to build a 10 GW data center in Ohio.

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Source: Incrypted