Who is buying AI training data, and who sells it.
33 companies
Largest single buyer of expert data, likely $1B+/yr via Mercor, Surge, and Turing, plus ~$120M/yr in disclosed licensing deals.
Spend$1B+/yr expert data plus ~$120M/yr licensing (News Corp ~$250M/5yr, Reddit ~$70M/yr)
Core Surge customer; the $1.5B book settlement forces licensed acquisition, with Data Operations and Product Partnerships roles open.
SpendPublicly undisclosed
Pays Reddit $60M/yr with renewal talks underway, licenses the AP real-time feed, and redistributed ~$200M/yr of Scale spend to Surge, Mercor, and Invisible.
SpendReddit $60M/yr; ~$200M/yr redistributed from Scale
Sends at least $450M/yr to Scale (49% owner) and licenses Shutterstock, implying a $900M+/yr total data budget.
Spend>=$450M/yr to Scale; ~$900M+/yr implied total
Rebuilt its internal tutor org around specialists such as lawyers, scientists, and accountants, an estimated $100M+/yr in labor bought through AI Tutor roles.
SpendEst. $100M+/yr specialist labor
Set the first public per-title price with HarperCollins at $5,000 per title, signed an Informa deal worth $10M+ initially, and is a Surge customer.
SpendHarperCollins $5,000/title; Informa $10M+ initial
Pays the New York Times $20-25M/yr for training and Alexa, and licenses Shutterstock and Wikimedia Enterprise.
SpendNYT $20-25M/yr
Signed a $25-50M Shutterstock deal and held ~$50M multiyear licensing talks with publishers.
SpendShutterstock $25-50M; ~$50M publisher talks
Licenses the AFP wire for Le Chat: 2,300 stories per day in 6 languages with archive access back to 1983.
SpendPublicly undisclosed
Trained Cosmos world models on 20M hours of video and runs Getty and Shutterstock licensing lanes.
SpendPublicly undisclosed
Raised $600M explicitly to collect more robotics data, with teleoperation benchmarks at $118-136/hr.
SpendTeleop benchmark $118-136/hr
Run proprietary teleoperation fleets (Figure at BMW, 1X moving to Redwood AI), with careers pages as the visible buy surface.
SpendPublicly undisclosed
Hit a $2B gross run-rate in June 2026, 91% from foundation-model labs, paying $2M+/day to its expert network in ~$20B valuation talks.
PricingExperts avg $85+/hr; $200+ senior
Reached $1.4B ARR in 2025, bootstrapped and profitable, serving OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, and Google as the neutral vendor after the Meta-Scale deal.
PricingCustom contracts
Projected ~$2B in 2025 with Meta owning 49% ($14.3B); lost Google and OpenAI post-deal and holds a $500M Pentagon contract.
PricingCustom enterprise contracts
Reached $300M annualized by April 2026, up from $7M ARR at the start of 2025, using its Zara AI recruiter for vetting.
PricingExperts $100+/hr
Grew from zero to ~$1.1B gross annualized in ~15 months off its 18M-student career network.
PricingExperts $100-125/hr; avg listing $108/hr
Runs $300M ARR profitably and launched Turing Frontier in April 2026 to sell expert reasoning traces.
PricingTuring Frontier $50-200/hr
Reached $134M annualized at end-2024, up 123% YoY, an OpenAI customer since 2022 claiming involvement in over 80% of top models.
PricingCustom contracts
Nebius subsidiary that raised a $72M Bezos-led round in May 2025, serving Amazon, Microsoft, and Anthropic.
PricingCustom contracts
Reached $350M annualized by April 2026 with 27K verified evaluators and the HUMAINE leaderboard, charging a 42.8% platform fee.
Pricing42.8% platform fee
Estimated $148M revenue in 2025 after a $100M Series D at a $1.3B valuation.
PricingCustom contracts
Holds a $3.2B valuation; its Alignerr network claims 2.6M experts logging 250K+ monthly hours.
Pricing$15-150/hr by domain
Reported AUD 230.8M in FY2025 with generative AI at 44% of Q4 revenue, the commodity-crowd cautionary tale.
PricingCustom contracts
Estimated ~$470M revenue in 2025 (Getlatka estimate, caution) serving GM, Ford, Microsoft, and Google.
PricingCustom contracts
Being acquired by EXL for up to $310M in Q3 2026, a signal of commodity margin compression.
PricingCustom contracts
Raised $70M and signed ~20 lab customers in 20 months selling robot teleoperation data.
PricingTeleop $15-30/hr simple, $80-150/hr complex humanoid
Raised a $60M Series C at a $550M valuation in February 2026 with physical-AI revenue up 10x.
PricingCustom contracts
Runs the Shipd bounty platform, has paid $1M+ to 1,400+ engineers, and raised a $15M Series A.
PricingBounty-based payouts
Processed 1M+ hours of licensed video and paid $20M+ to 7,000+ rights holders, with open seller intake.
Pricing$0.75-3/min exclusive
Grew 20x in 2025 licensing billions of clinical notes and 300K+ hours of video, backed by a $30M a16z round in January 2026.
PricingCustom contracts
Nearly alone in generating new wet-lab data for AI training, fee-for-service with the customer owning the data.
PricingFee-for-service
Creator and publisher data marketplace acquired by Cloudflare in January 2026 for CDN-scale licensing.
PricingMarketplace licensing
Marketplace intake
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