Microwan Surpasses $100 Million Annual Revenue in Two Years

Staff Reporter | PNN

Startup Microwan, which provides human expertise and data training management for AI labs and AI-driven companies, has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in just two years. Founder and CEO Ali Ansari told TechCrunch that this growth places the company among rapidly expanding AI firms.

Microwan started the year with about $7 million in annual recurring revenue. By September, during a $35 million Series A funding round, the revenue had less than doubled. Ansari stated that Microwan works with leading AI labs, such as Microsoft, and Fortune 100 companies engaged in post-training and reinforcement learning for large language models.

He noted that the high demand for quality human data is rapidly expanding the market. While the current market size is estimated at $10–15 billion, it could reach nearly $100 billion within two years.

Although Microwan’s growth is faster than competitors like Merkor and Surge, they have not yet surpassed their final revenue. Merkor’s annual recurring revenue exceeds $450 million, and Surge’s was $1.2 billion in 2024.

Ansari attributes Microwan’s growth to expert recruitment and effective evaluation. The company started with its AI recruitment tool “Zara,” matching software and engineering talent, then entered the human-data training market.

Microwan is expanding into two new areas: (1) creating AI agents for non-AI-native Fortune 100 companies for internal workflows, support operations, finance, and industry-specific tasks; (2) robotics pre-training based on human-generated daily work data. Microwan is building the world’s largest robotics pre-training dataset.

Ansari said, “Non-AI-native companies spend a large portion of product budgets on human data and evaluation. Combined, these two areas could create a $100 billion annual market.”

Currently, Microwan mainly works with AI labs and AI-dependent organizations, managing thousands of experts, many earning around $100 per hour. Professors from Harvard and PhDs from Stanford contribute to AI training through Microwan.

Microwan aims to expand responsibly, leveraging human-driven robotics data and enterprise agent development.