AfterQuery raises Series A
SF‑based data startup AfterQuery raised $30M in a Series A at a $300M valuation and says it has surpassed $100M in ARR while positioning itself as the 'data layer for professional AI.' The round and hiring push underline continued investor appetite for infrastructure plays feeding the enterprise AI stack. (x.com)
A 14-month-old startup says it already crossed a $100 million annual revenue run rate, then paired that claim with a $30 million Series A round at a $300 million valuation announced on April 9. The company is AfterQuery, based in San Francisco. (businesswire.com) The money came from Altos Ventures, with The Raine Group joining and existing backers Y Combinator and BoxGroup also in the round. Altos partner Zac Mohring is joining AfterQuery’s board. (businesswire.com) What AfterQuery sells is not a chatbot app. It sells the raw material underneath one: datasets and training environments built from how real professionals in fields like finance, software engineering, medicine, and law actually make decisions. (businesswire.com) Think of it like the difference between teaching a student from a textbook and letting that student watch 100,000 practitioners do the job. AfterQuery says it has worked with nearly 100,000 verified professionals to turn their judgment and routines into training data for artificial intelligence models. (businesswire.com) The founders did not start here. Spencer Mateega and Carlos Georgescu first tried building artificial intelligence agents for finance, then changed course after seeing that models struggled with white-collar work because they had not been trained on the messy details of how professionals operate. (forbes.com) That pivot put AfterQuery in a crowded but fast-growing corner of the artificial intelligence boom: data. Forbes says the company competes with firms like Mercor to sell coding and finance training data to labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. (forbes.com) AfterQuery says “every leading AI lab” is now a customer, and Forbes reports demand from Anthropic and OpenAI helped drive the revenue run rate past $100 million. Forbes also says individual researchers tied to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, and Microsoft’s artificial intelligence division participated in the financing. (businesswire.com) (forbes.com) The hiring plan shows where the cash is going. AfterQuery’s careers page lists roles across engineering, operations, research, growth, and marketing, and its Y Combinator jobs page shows senior infrastructure roles paying up to $280,000 and strategy roles up to $400,000. (afterquery.com) (ycombinator.com) The valuation also says something about what investors want right now. Instead of betting only on flashy consumer tools, this round backs a company trying to become plumbing for the enterprise artificial intelligence stack: the layer that feeds models expert-grade examples before those models ever reach users. (businesswire.com) (forbes.com)
