Friday, 21 August 2026 No. 5 Updated
THE VISSION
The daily record of artificial intelligence

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Training data

Micro1 says its gross run rate reached $500m, five times its level eight months ago

The AI training-data supplier nets $150m to $200m of that, and says it refuses to sell to Chinese developers on national-security grounds.

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The short version
  • Micro1 reports a $500m gross annual run rate, up from $100m eight months ago, of which it retains $150m to $200m net after paying contracted experts.
  • The company supplies AI training data by contracting domain specialists — doctors, lawyers, scientists — plus reinforcement-learning evaluation, synthetic data and robotics pre-training sets.
  • Its off-the-shelf data carries 80–90% gross margins, against far thinner economics on the contracted-expert work.
  • It trails Mercor at about $2bn gross annualised revenue and Handshake at about $1bn; founder Ali Ansari says the company will not sell data to Chinese AI developers.

The AI training-data supplier nets $150m to $200m of that, and says it refuses to sell to Chinese developers on national-security grounds.