Mercor AI Research Fund Grants: Benchmarks

ABOUT MERCOR Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.   Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices. MERCOR AI RESEARCH FUND GRANTS: BENCHMARKS One of the biggest challenges facing the industry today is determining whether frontier AI is capable enough to deliver value in real-world settings. A model can perform well on benchmarks and still struggle in production. That’s why investing in research, realistic evaluations, and robust verification is critical. Mercor is seeking to fund AI research on benchmarking. This is separate from the Mercor Research Fellowship, which funds individual experts (apply HERE https://www.mercor.com/careers/a0a98be0-d856-4129-b500-c0a3e412ef01/), our $5m of safety funding awards (apply HERE https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/1d59ce50-4207-4d95-b7fd-5a01e90b0897), and our research funding on the economic impacts of AI. The grant supports: - The time of experts from Mercor's platform - Researcher hours - API costs - Stipends for event and conference attendance BUDGET CATEGORIES Applications are grouped into three budget tiers. Please state your tier clearly in your application and ensure your overall budget ask falls within it: - Tier 1: under $50,000: Suited to focused, well-scoped projects such as pilot studies, evaluations, replications, or extensions of existing work. These applications undergo a streamlined review. - Tier 2: under $200,000: Suited to substantial projects requiring dedicated personnel time, meaningful compute, or data collection. Reviewed with proportionally greater attention to the budget breakdown and implementation plan. - Tier 3: under $500,000: Reserved for ambitious, multi-component research programs. These applications receive the highest level of scrutiny: reviewers will expect a detailed justification of each spend category, a clear account of team capacity to execute at this scale, and milestones against which progress can be assessed. The level of review scrutiny scales with the size of the ask, so applicants should request the smallest budget that credibly supports the proposed work.   RESEARCH AGENDA   We are interested in submissions in the following area: - Real-world evaluations: measuring whether benchmark performance translates into reliable performance on realistic tasks and workflows - Environments: building high-fidelity, interactive environments that capture the complexity of real-world work - Long-horizon tasks: evaluating and improving models’ ability to plan, execute, and adapt across extended workflows - Agentic capabilities: tool use, coordination, memory, and autonomous execution - Reasoning and problem-solving: improving performance on complex, ambiguous, or underspecified tasks - Post-training: developing better data, rewards, and training methods to improve model capabilities - Evaluation methodology: creating more robust measures of capability, reliability, and real-world utility ELIGIBILITY - Researchers at universities and non-profit research organizations, as well as public benefit corporations and small startu