Micro1 hits $500M run rate — and it's refusing China's cash
ai data startup micro1 reached a $500m gross annual run rate, catching rivals like mercor. founder ali ansari refuses to sell data to chinese labs, citing national security and adversarial competition.
micro1, a data-labeling startup, hit a $500m gross annual run rate ($150m-$200m net) in eight months by hiring doctors and lawyers to generate training data and run reinforcement learning gyms. the company is shifting toward high-margin synthetic data, achieving 80-90% gross margins by reselling automated datasets, while competitors like mercor and handshake have reached multi-billion dollar run rates. founder ali ansari blocks sales to chinese model makers like kimi k3, arguing that funding adversaries contradicts goals of us ai dominance. micro1 is also raising capital at a higher valuation after a $500m series a and is building robotics datasets by recording human interactions.