AI Training Data Companies in 2026

Mercor matches you with the best AI companies in the world.

Rise Data Labs is a VC-backed company providing high-fidelity training and evaluation data for AI models. They combine human expertise with automation to power training, evaluation, and generative AI development. The company operates an Automated Talent Engine with 500,000+ US professionals (98% college or higher), and specializes in data annotation and labeling for text, image, audio, video, and RLHF applications across domains like healthcare, finance, legal, and gaming.

Micro1 is an AI platform focused on human intelligence infrastructure for AI, including expert data operations, evaluation workflows, and AI-enabled recruiting (Zara). It supports data engine and intelligence workflows used for model training and performance improvement.

Outlier AI specializes in RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) tasks, helping train large language models. They offer flexible remote work for AI trainers with expertise in various domains including coding, writing, mathematics, and more.

DataAnnotation.tech focuses on providing RLHF and data annotation services for leading AI labs. They specialize in expert-level tasks requiring domain knowledge in coding, math, science, and humanities.

Scale AI is the data-centric AI company, providing high-quality training data for AI applications. They work with major tech companies and government agencies to label and annotate data at scale. Their platform enables thousands of remote workers to contribute to AI development through various annotation tasks.

Handshake (founded 2014) connects students and alumni with employers. 17M+ students; ~1M employers including Fortune 500. Employer validation via Persona; fraud detection.

RemoExperts (Rex.zone) is a remote job platform connecting workers with AI/ML companies for data annotation, RLHF, and LLM evaluation. Uses Label Studio, CVAT, Prodigy; SOC 2-aligned, GDPR compliant.

Uber AI Solutions is Uber Technologies' enterprise data annotation and labeling unit. Leverages 10+ years of internal expertise; 8M+ global earners, 72 countries. Text, image, audio, video, LiDAR labeling with uLabel/uTask platforms.

TaskVerse is a microtask platform by TaskUs (founded 2008) for image annotation, speech recording, and word tagging. Nearly 900K users in 100+ countries. Weekly PayPal payments.

Clickworker is a Germany-based crowdsourcing platform with 7M+ workers in 136 countries. Tasks include AI training, surveys, data annotation, content creation. PayPal payments; 99% quality SLA for clients.

CloudFactory provides human-in-the-loop AI data services: annotation, validation, curation for computer vision, NLP, and AI pipelines. Managed teams and structured workflows; HQ Reading, UK.

Toloka is a crowdsourcing platform by Yandex (founded 2014) for data labeling and annotation. Millions of Tolokers; clients include Yandex, Rambler, Ozone, Avito. Payoneer/Papara payouts.

xAI is Elon Musk's AI company (founded 2023) behind Grok. Mission to understand the universe and accelerate science. ~$6B funding; team from Google, Microsoft, DeepMind, OpenAI. Now part of SpaceX merger.

Perplexity AI is an AI search engine company (founded 2022). ~250 employees; $1.7B funding; investors include SoftBank, Nvidia. Forbes AI 50 and Cloud 100. HQ San Francisco.

Stellar AI (joinstellar.ai) offers data annotation, AI model evaluation, and QA tasks. Remote; rates from $25/hr; project-based; quality over speed. Terms of Service and testimonials published.

Abaka AI provides AI data annotation and curation (MooreData platform). Full lifecycle: collection, curation, annotation, evaluation. 1B+ question bank; San Jose-based; founded 2019.

Lionbridge offers AI data services: translation, data collection, annotation, HITL evaluation. 600,000+ contributors, 350+ languages, 450+ locales. Trust Center and careers page.

OneForma is a global AI data platform (20+ years, Redmond WA). 1.8M+ hired; 20K+ projects, 200 countries. Part of Centific ecosystem. Twice-monthly PayPal/Payoneer.

iMerit is an AI data labeling company trusted by Microsoft, Google Cloud, AWS, eBay, J&J, Autodesk. Image, video, LiDAR annotation; generative AI fine-tuning; NIST and ISO 27001.

TransPerfect is a translation and language services company ($1B+ revenue, 29+ years). DataForce has 1M+ professionals for AI data collection and annotation. ISO 18587 for AI translation.

TELUS International is a subsidiary of TELUS (Vancouver). AI data annotation: images, text, voice. Contractors paid via Hyperwallet; ~10 business days.

Braintrust is a decentralized talent network connecting freelancers with NASA, Walmart, Nike, Goldman Sachs. 0% freelancer fee (keep 100%); clients pay 10-15%. 600K+ members.

Welocalize (founded 1997) is a top language service provider. Welo Data brand (2024) for AI training: annotation, LLM enhancement, data collection. 500K+ experts; 7 ISO certifications.

Surge AI (Surge Labs) is a data labeling and AI training company that contracts workers for annotation, content moderation, and RLHF. Partners include Meta, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic. $25M funding; Forbes AI 50.

RWS is a world-leading language and content technology company (60+ years, 7,500+ employees). Language Weaver AI translation; TrainAI data collection and annotation; GDPR compliant.

Cohere is an AI company (founded 2019, Toronto) building language models. ~$1B raised; $5.5B valuation; Salesforce, Nvidia. Forbes AI 50. Offices globally; hybrid/remote; strong benefits.

Centific is a global AI data solutions company operating a data marketplace and annotation platform with 1.8M+ annotators across 230+ languages. Services include data collection, RLHF, supervised fine-tuning, model safety evaluation, and localization for enterprises including Microsoft.

Mindrift is an AI training platform powered by Toloka. 20K+ trainers; 50 domains, 15 languages; 70% Master's/PhD. $15-90/hr for LLM evaluation, feedback, hallucination detection.

Silencio collects and labels audio data for AI training. Over 1.5M+ contributors in 180+ countries; over $3M paid to contributors. Used for speech recognition, robotics, and voice interfaces. GDPR compliant.

Prolific is a research participant platform for academic and commercial studies. Participants complete surveys, diaries, video interviews. £6-12/hr; PayPal; 4.5-star Trustpilot.

Gloz connects contributors with AI training tasks for language model development. Project-based work; pay varies by task and language. Strong English and attention to detail required.

LXT (founded 2010) provides speech and NLP data collection, annotation, evaluation. 8M+ contributors, 1,000+ locales; ISO 27001; Fortune 100 clients. Acquired Clickworker.

Innodata Inc. (founded 1988, NJ) provides AI data services: annotation, collection, generative AI (fine-tuning, RLHF, safety). 4,000+ experts; healthcare, legal, finance. Seven of world's largest tech clients.

SuperAnnotate is an AI data annotation company (founded 2018). $36M Series B (NVIDIA, Databricks); CB Insights AI 100. Serves 200+ companies, 20% of Fortune 20. SME Careers is their expert platform.

SME Careers connects subject matter experts with AI training opportunities.

Invisible Technologies combines human intelligence with AI to deliver digital operations at scale. They offer roles in AI training, quality assurance, and process automation for Fortune 500 companies.

Appen is one of the largest AI training data companies globally, serving major tech companies. They offer a variety of projects from search relevance evaluation to autonomous driving data collection.

Remotasks is a global platform for data annotation and AI training tasks. They offer a wide range of task types from simple image labeling to complex RLHF evaluations. Their community of remote workers spans over 200 countries.

Alignerr is an AI training platform owned by Labelbox ($3.2B data infrastructure company). Pays bi-weekly via Deel; $15-150/hr; 4.5 Trustpilot. AI interviewer Zara for assessments.

rustLabs pays vetted domain experts to build reinforcement-learning data and evaluations for AI labs (especially smaller labs), converting specialized knowledge into training data across software engineering, finance, ML, science, legal, and medical. Experts apply with proof of expertise, complete a calibration task, then pick projects and work remotely by the hour.

Pasiflora AI (launched April 2026, Eagan, Minnesota) connects AI labs with credentialed domain experts (PhD, MD, JD, CFA) to produce specialized training data that general crowdsourcing cannot. Every approved expert completes its 'Bloom Program' onboarding before being staffed, and work is matched by credential level. Led by CEO Kari Olson.

Pila8 is a mobile contributor app by Y Combinator-backed BeSimple AI (founded 2025, Redwood City) that pays users to record short voice and video clips used to train AI speech models on accents, dialects, and tonalities. Contributors read prompts, record and submit audio, and are paid per approved minute; the app also offers LLM red-teaming and evaluation tasks.

Thoth AI is a Singapore-headquartered AI data-services company providing multilingual training data across 200+ languages and 100+ countries, plus content moderation. It supports the full data lifecycle - collection, cleaning, and annotation of images, video, 3D point clouds, text, and audio - operating as a managed-services partner rather than a self-serve gig marketplace.

Luel (Y Combinator W26) is a rights-cleared marketplace and collection engine for multimodal AI training data. Enterprises submit a dataset spec and Luel recruits from a 500,000+ global contributor network across 96 countries, runs multi-stage QA, and delivers licensed, audit-ready datasets. Founded by William Namgyal and Inigo Lenderking; backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Labela is a platform where medical experts get paid to label medical data and evaluate medical AI outputs on a flexible schedule, positioning itself as a healthcare/life-science domain-expert community for AI training. It targets credentialed medical professionals rather than generalist annotators.

Fleet is an applied research lab that builds high-fidelity reinforcement-learning training environments ('gyms') replicating real-world software (Salesforce, Excel) and browser/desktop workflows, sold to frontier AI labs and enterprises to train and evaluate computer-use agents. It ships a Python SDK, a platform API, and open-source 'Harbor' agent-evaluation tooling; backed by Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and SV Angel.

Aligned Labs (founded 2024, San Francisco) is an expert network connecting PhDs, senior consultants, and 15+ year specialists to paid freelance work training and evaluating frontier AI models across 11 academic domains. Work skews toward hard problems, such as writing physics problems today's best models still get wrong, rather than basic annotation; OpenAI is a publicly cited client.

DATAmundi (founded 2007, Belgium) is a multilingual data-annotation company specializing in creating, annotating, and managing high-quality language data for NLP and AI. It was acquired by Summa Linguae Technologies and now operates as part of that group's AI data services.

BLEND (formerly One Hour Translation, founded 2008; rebranded 2021) is a global localization platform employing thousands of freelance translators and linguists across 120+ languages. Beyond translation it offers transcription, data annotation, and multilingual voice recording via its GM Voices acquisition.

GoTranscript (founded 2005, UK) is a transcription company that hires remote freelance transcriptionists, translators, and proofreaders worldwide. Freelancers pick available files and are paid per audio minute ($0.50-1.20/min), with weekly payouts every Friday via PayPal or Payoneer.

Sigma AI (founded 2008, Madrid) is a long-established global data-collection, preparation, and annotation company. It labels speech, text, image, and video data for AI training and supports over 500 languages and dialects, with offices in Madrid, Miami, and London.

CNTXT AI (legal entity CNTXT FZCO, founded 2022, Abu Dhabi) is a UAE-based, Arabic-first data and AI company serving MENA enterprises and governments. It provides training-data labeling and annotation and builds proprietary Arabic AI products, including its 'Munsit' Arabic speech-to-text model covering Modern Standard Arabic and 25+ dialects.

Claru is the training-data platform of Reka AI, focused on physical-AI and robotics datasets. It recruits contributors for paid, project-based real-world data collection and annotation across 100+ cities, with geo-tiered pay (about $15/hr in the US down to $5/hr in Asia) and USD bi-weekly bank payouts.

Vetto is a venture-backed talent-network and data platform (founded 2022, pivoted from 'Start Carreiras') connecting professionals with remote AI evaluation, annotation, and human-feedback projects for frontier AI labs. It emphasizes subject-matter-expert work in legal, mental-health, and performance domains alongside an enterprise annotation/QA platform.

Verita AI is an early-stage premium expert network (founded 2025) connecting vetted domain experts, creatives, and practitioners with paid, remote AI evaluation and training-data projects for AI labs. It focuses on curated multimodal datasets and expert human judgment, currently recruiting experts in the US, UK, and Canada.

Lilt (founded 2015, Emeryville) is an AI translation and localization company using a human-in-the-loop model that pairs adaptive machine translation with professional linguists across 70+ languages. It hires professional translators and linguists and, increasingly, AI data experts for human-in-the-loop work.

Concentrix (NASDAQ: CNXC) is a large publicly traded business-process-outsourcing company whose AI Data Services division provides human-in-the-loop data for GenAI and LLM development. Work spans LLM output evaluation, RLHF and preference ranking, multimodal annotation, and trust-and-safety review, delivered through managed multilingual teams.

Atlas Capture is an early-stage, globally available data-collection platform. Its iPhone app pays contributors to record short first-person (egocentric) video of everyday household activities using a head-mounted phone in ~90-minute sessions, while a separate pool is paid to watch and tag those clips for robotics and computer-vision training.

Workada is a remote AI-training and data-labeling platform offering contract tasks such as reviewing text, images, and documents, categorizing examples, evaluating responses, and quality-checking data to improve AI systems. It advertises flexible scheduling, contributor training, and pay of $18-22/hr for up to 40 hours a week.

Terac is an AI-native panel-infrastructure company that recruits, verifies, and operates a global panel of domain experts, selling on-demand access via its platform and API. It screens every expert with conversational AI that checks identity, credentials, and knowledge across 200+ fields; experts complete commissioned studies, interviews, and evaluations for market-research firms and frontier AI labs, paid once work is approved.

Pareto.AI (founded 2020, CEO Phoebe Yao) is a human-data platform connecting AI companies with expert labelers to produce training and fine-tuning data. It positions itself as talent-first, sourcing skilled labelers globally (a large share based in Kenya), with contributor pay around $35-50/hr paid weekly via PayPal or Wise after review.

Snorkel AI (founded 2019, Redwood City, originating from Stanford AI research) builds specialized training data, benchmarks, and evaluation environments for frontier models. Its Expert Data-as-a-Service and Expert Community recruit master's- and PhD-level professionals in fields like oncology, aerospace, and accounting to create and review datasets rather than doing crowdsourced micro-tasks.

Ethos, which operates the AskEthos expert portal, is an AI-native expert network founded in 2024 by James Lo (ex-McKinsey/SoftBank) and Daniel Mankowitz (ex-Google DeepMind). It connects senior professionals such as private-equity VPs, physicians, and litigators with AI labs for evaluation, training, and consulting work at rates roughly $35-225/hr.

Turing (founded 2018, Palo Alto) is an AGI-infrastructure company that post-trains large language models for advanced reasoning and coding for major AI labs and Fortune 500 clients. Beyond developer staffing, it runs AI training and a Frontier Contributor Program recruiting researchers, graduate students, and domain experts to produce reasoning, alignment, and evaluation data.

Sovrano AI is a Barcelona-based platform building Europe's expert human-evaluation layer for frontier AI. It sources graduate-level domain specialists from 100+ European universities (120K+ evaluators across 23 languages) for RLHF preference labeling, model evaluation, red-teaming, and reasoning benchmarks, emphasizing EU-resident, GDPR-compliant experts.

Meridial is the expert marketplace operated by Invisible Technologies, connecting specialists with freelance AI training projects across language, coding, STEM, medical, legal and creative domains. Work is project-based and fully remote, covering data annotation, model evaluation, voice recording and domain-expert task authoring for frontier AI labs.

AfterQuery is a YC-backed AI research data company that builds expert-generated datasets and evaluation environments for frontier AI labs. It hires domain experts (medicine, law, finance, software engineering, science, languages) on a remote, contract basis to design tasks, write reference solutions, and grade model outputs.