Mercor competitor Deccan AI raises $25M, sources experts from India

Deccan AI has raised $25 million in its first major funding round, an all-equity Series A led by A91 Partners with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures.

The startup, founded in October 2024 and headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with a large operations team in Hyderabad, provides post-training data and evaluation services to frontier AI labs and enterprises.

Founder Rukesh Reddy said the company has onboarded about 10 customers including Google DeepMind and Snowflake, running a couple of dozen active projects at any given time.

Deccan AI employs about 125 people and relies on a network of more than 1 million contributors, with 5,000 to 10,000 active in a typical month, primarily sourced from India.

The company offers services ranging from improving model coding and agent capabilities to training systems on external tool interactions, delivered through products including its Helix evaluation suite and operations automation platform.

Earnings on Deccan's platform range from about $10 to $700 per hour, with top contributors earning up to $7,000 monthly, as the startup competes with companies like Mercor, Turing, and Meta-owned Scale AI in the growing AI training services market.

Reddy emphasized that quality remains an unsolved problem, noting that tolerance for errors in post-training is "close to zero" as mistakes can directly affect model performance in production.