Mercor AI Research Fund Grants

ABOUT MERCOR

Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.

Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.

Mercor AI Research Fund Grants $5M

One of the biggest challenges facing the industry today is determining whether frontier AI is capable enough to deliver value in real-world settings. A model can perform well on benchmarks and still struggle in production. That’s why investing in research, realistic evaluations, and robust verification is critical.

Mercor is committing $5 million to fund AI research. Award size and mix depend on the project. The grant supports:

• The time of experts from Mercor's platform

• Researcher hours

• API costs

• Stipends for event and conference attendance

This is separate from the Mercor Research Fellowship, which funds individual experts (apply HERE https://www.mercor.com/careers/a0a98be0-d856-4129-b500-c0a3e412ef01/) and our $5m of safety funding awards (apply HERE https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/1d59ce50-4207-4d95-b7fd-5a01e90b0897).

What we're looking for

• Real-world evaluations: measuring whether benchmark performance translates into reliable performance on realistic tasks and workflows

• Environments: building high-fidelity, interactive environments that capture the complexity of real-world work

• Long-horizon tasks: evaluating and improving models’ ability to plan, execute, and adapt across extended workflows

• Agentic capabilities: tool use, coordination, memory, and autonomous execution

• Reasoning and problem-solving: improving performance on complex, ambiguous, or underspecified tasks

• Post-training: developing better data, rewards, and training methods to improve model capabilities

• Evaluation methodology: creating more robust measures of capability, reliability, and real-world utility

Why us

• Funding for researcher time, API costs, and event attendance

• Where useful to the work: access to Mercor's expert network for human grading and annotation: lawyers, accountants, engineers, scientists, clinicians

• Access to Mercor's internal evaluation infrastructure, subject to review

• Introductions to Mercor's network of researchers across frontier labs and academia

WHO SHOULD APPLY

• Researchers at universities and non-profit research organizations, as well as public benefit corporations and small startups that do not sell AI training data. Awards are made to the researcher’s institution.

• People with a specific, well-scoped question: the grant is built around your proposal, not a generic research rotation

• Applicants based in the United States or the United Kingdom

• Bonus: researchers with experience with agentic evaluation, RL environments, and post-training.

We expect grantees to publish – such as a paper, an open dataset, a public methodology, or a tool the field can use, released under an open license that permits commercial use.

Award terms

Selected grantees will sign Mercor’s research award agreement. Key terms include:

• Grantees keep ownership of their work and grant Mercor a non-exclusive license to use it, including commercially.

• Merco