Mercor competitor Deccan AI raises $25M, sources experts from India
The startup, backed by A91 and Prosus, taps a network of 1M+ Indian experts for critical model refinement.
Deccan AI, a startup specializing in the crucial post-training phase of AI development, has secured $25 million in a Series A funding round. The investment was led by A91 Partners with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. Founded in late 2024, the company addresses the intense demand from frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as enterprises, for high-quality data labeling, expert feedback, and rigorous model evaluation. This 'last-mile' work is essential for making AI systems reliable and safe for production use, with error tolerance often near zero.
Headquartered in the Bay Area with a major operations hub in Hyderabad, Deccan leverages a vast, skilled workforce in India. It maintains a network of over 1 million contributors—including students, domain experts, and PhDs—with 5,000-10,000 active in a typical month. This concentrated talent pool allows Deccan to manage quality and speed for complex tasks like improving coding capabilities or training AI agents to use APIs. The company's products include the Helix evaluation suite and an operations automation platform, serving about 10 customers including Google DeepMind on dozens of active projects.
The funding underscores a strategic shift in the AI industry, where core model building remains in-house but the labor-intensive refinement is increasingly outsourced. Deccan competes with companies like Scale AI, Surge AI, Turing, and Mercor in this booming market. Founder Rukesh Reddy emphasized the sector's challenges: balancing the need for rapid, high-volume data delivery with extreme accuracy. Deccan differentiates by focusing heavily on India for talent, arguing this concentration improves quality control compared to rivals sourcing from over 100 countries, while offering contributors earnings from $10 to $700 per hour.
- Raised $25M in Series A funding led by A91 Partners, with Prosus Ventures participating.
- Operates a network of over 1 million contributors, primarily in India, with 5,000-10,000 active monthly.
- Provides critical post-training services like evaluation and reinforcement learning for clients including Google DeepMind and Snowflake.
Why It Matters
High-quality post-training data is the bottleneck for deploying reliable AI; this funding validates a major new outsourcing hub.