Mercor AI Research Fund Grants: Benchmarks

The role

Mercor is seeking to fund AI research on benchmarking. The grant supports researcher hours, API costs, expert time, and stipends for event and conference attendance.

What you will do

• Publish a paper, an open dataset, a public methodology, or a tool released under an open license that permits commercial use
• Submit an Expression of Interest including research question, project proposal, novelty, risks, team, outcomes, and budget

Required qualifications

• Researchers at universities and non-profit research organizations, public benefit corporations, or small startups (<20 people) that do not sell AI training data
• Applicants must be based in the United States or the United Kingdom
• Grantees must sign Mercor's research award agreement
• Awards are subject to tax documentation, sanctions screening, and periodic progress reports

Nice to have

• Experience with agentic evaluation, RL environments, and post-training

Benefits

• Tier 1 budget: under $50,000
• Tier 2 budget: under $200,000
• Tier 3 budget: under $500,000

Before you apply

• Awards are made to the researcher's institution
• Late or incomplete applications will not be reviewed
• Submitting an Expression of Interest does not obligate Mercor to make an award

About the company

Mercor builds infrastructure that enables frontier AI labs and enterprises to train, evaluate, and improve AI on real-world professional work. The company is profitable and recently raised a $750 million Series D at a $20 billion valuation.