Nvidia is in talks to invest in the startup Mercor, which specializes in data preparation involving humans. The deal is being conducted as part of a new funding round, and as a result, Mercor’s potential valuation could reach $20 billion, which is twice the figure for October 2025. According to The Information, venture capital firm General Catalyst, which is already an investor in the startup, is in talks about leading a new round, and the exact size of Nvidia’s potential investment remains unknown.

Nvidia’s interest in Mercor is driven by a sharp increase in the need for high‑quality data to train its own artificial intelligence models, in particular the open‑source Nemotron line. Mercor specializes in bringing in subject‑matter experts to evaluate and prepare data in fields such as law, finance, and science. During the previous quarter alone, Nvidia paid the startup tens of millions of dollars for materials that were used in the last two releases of Nemotron models. To handle this order, Mercor even formed a separate group of employees. At the same time, the startup’s financial performance is growing rapidly: in June, its annual gross revenue reached two billion dollars, doubling compared to the beginning of the year. In addition to data prepared by humans, Nvidia also actively uses synthetic data and information obtained through the OpenRouter platform.

A potential investment in Mercor is part of Nvidia’s large‑scale expansion of its venture capital activity. In the quarter that ended in April 2026, the company allocated eighteen and six‑tenths billion dollars to private investments and infrastructure funds. Among the major deals are investments of two billion dollars each in cloud infrastructure operators CoreWeave and Nebius, as well as in manufacturers of optical components Lumentum and Coherent. The Mercor startup itself, founded three years ago, has already raised about five hundred and twenty million dollars from investors. In parallel, Nvidia is strengthening its presence in major projects: the company owns shares in SpaceX worth approximately $21 billion and is in talks to secure $250 billion in financial guarantees for OpenAI’s large‑scale project to build a 10‑gigawatt data center in Ohio.

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The material has been prepared solely for informational and educational purposes and does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation.