Micro1 ARR hit $50M, How a new AI Coding Adds $1M ARR Every 10 Days
AI Coding’s explosive growth is still on
Data labeling services sparked AI recruitment platforms
The AI boom has sparked a relentless demand for talent, which in turn is fueling rapid growth in AI recruitment products. The most notable player right now is Mercor, whose ARR hit $100M in 2 years.
Meta’s investment in Scale AI has been particularly beneficial for other companies in this space, as these AI recruiting platforms are increasingly doing work similar to Scale AI.
Micro1 emerged around the same time as Mercor, with a founder also from the college-dropout-to-entrepreneur path.
While not as explosive as Mercor, its growth has still been impressive. When I became aware of it last year, Micro1’s valuation was $80M, having just closed its seed round.
It positions itself as an AI recruitment platform, designed to simplify hiring by sourcing and matching the world’s top software engineering talent. I once described it as using AI to do what traditional headhunters do.
At that point, it wasn’t just an AI interview tool—it covered the entire hiring workflow, from talent sourcing and screening to interviewing and hiring, even posting job openings directly through the platform.
By screening thousands of candidates each month with AI and certifying the top 1% as a premium talent pool, Micro1 simultaneously addresses enterprise hiring needs while rapidly building its own database.
The massive demand from AI companies for training data has essentially pushed all players toward Scale AI- and Surge-like business models (Surge, for example, is reportedly raising $1B at a $15B valuation).
Micro1’s Human Data page highlights this approach:
We generate the best training data at the most reasonable price because we can conduct a massive volume of interviews.
We focus on discovering ‘gems’—1 in 1,000 candidates owns their work. Our AI Recruiter enables this, interviewing thousands daily, 24/7, adapting to all time zones and languages.
Our platform experts are subject matter specialists who complete our human data curriculum, helping select individuals with domain expertise and guide them in contributing to AI training.
We’ve built our annotation platform in-house, allowing our world-class engineers to integrate new workflows in days, not weeks or months.
This huge demand has fueled Micro1’s revenue growth: in March, its annualized revenue was around $8M, jumped to $20M by May, and now exceeds $50M.
Micro1 has likely completed its Series A round, reportedly backed by 01A and LG’s investment arm, with a valuation of $500M. It’s expected to hit $100M in ARR by the end of September—nearly catching up to Mercor, though the valuation gap remains significant.
AI Coding’s explosive growth is still on
On the AI coding side, multiple tools have already shown explosive growth, such as Cursor, Lovable, Replit,.etc. New products continue to emerge with equally insane growth.
One standout AI coding tool grew 19x in revenue this year, now adding $1M ARR every 10 days, which I think it is a super cool company.
