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An AI Teaching Data Startup Just Became Y Combinator's Fastest-Ever Unicorn
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AfterQuery, an 18-month-old AI startup, has reached a $3.2 billion valuation in a new funding round, Forbes reported Monday.
Key facts
- Scale AI's Alexandr Wang became the industry's first data-labeling billionaire in 2021 at age 24, before Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake and put Wang atop its own AI lab
- Spencer Mateega and Carlos Georgescu founded the company in February 2025, 18 months after joining Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch as two high school friends with no product and no fixed idea
- AfterQuery, an 18-month-old AI startup, has reached a $3.2 billion valuation in a new funding round, Forbes reported Monday
- Mercor, for its part, is currently in talks with Nvidia for a funding round that would value it at $20 billion, doubling its $10 billion price tag from last October
Summary
AfterQuery has reached a $3.2 billion valuation, up from $300 million five months ago, Forbes reported, citing two people with direct knowledge of the deal. Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer called it the fastest run from launch to unicorn status—startup shorthand for a private company worth over $1 billion—in the accelerator's history. Founders Spencer Mateega, 23, and Carlos Georgescu, 22, pay doctors, lawyers, engineers, and financial analysts to generate the kind of expert judgment data that AI labs can no longer scrape off the open internet. The jump makes AfterQuery the fastest startup in Y Combinator's history to go from inception to unicorn status, according to YC partner Gustaf Alströmer.