❯ Training data company Micro1 raises $100 million-plus at $4 billion, up eightfold in a year

the valuation jumpPer Forbes, AI training data company Micro1 raised more than $100 million at a $4 billion valuation, up eightfold from $500 million in September 2025. The company now runs at more than $500 million in annualized revenue. Founder Ali Ansari is 25.

from recruiting to dataMicro1 started as an AI recruiting business before Ansari saw the bigger opportunity was not finding technical workers but supplying frontier labs with high-quality human-created data; it repositioned around using its AI interviewer to vet engineers, doctors, lawyers and other domain experts who produce training and evaluation data. Customers reportedly include frontier labs, Microsoft, Amazon and robotics companies like 1X, several of which joined the round, including two frontier labs and two xAI co-founders.

the data layer gets pricedThe same day, training data company Snorkel AI raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation. Companies supplying data to model makers are being priced as their own category for a simple reason: as algorithms and compute converge, domain-expert data is one of the few inputs that still separates results. Customers investing directly says labs would rather hold equity to lock in supply than remain buyers.

▪ SIGNALLabs taking equity in their data suppliers says high-quality human data has moved from procurement item to strategic resource that needs locking down.