Handshake's AI revenue surge

Handshake’s new growth engine is not campus recruiting. It is supplying human contractors who help train artificial intelligence models, a business The Information said hit $550 million in annualized revenue in January. (theinformation.com) The company was generating about $5 million to $10 million a year from that work a year earlier, The Information reported on April 13. The same report said the business is now nearing a $1 billion annual run rate. (theinformation.com) Handshake launched Handshake AI in 2025 and said it would manage the full process for artificial intelligence labs: recruiting graduate-level experts, training them, and producing data on its own annotation platform. The company said those experts write prompts, assess model answers, and judge output quality in fields including law, finance, virology, and music theory. (joinhandshake.com) On its current Handshake AI page, the company pitches the work as a paid, remote fellowship and says participants can earn up to $100 an hour. Its help center says the program connects current students, recent graduates, and professionals to project-based work improving large language models. (joinhandshake.com, support.joinhandshake.com) That is a sharp turn for a company founded in 2014 to help college students get internships and first jobs. Handshake says it now has 20 million active college students and recent alumni, 1 million employers, and 1,600-plus university partnerships. (joinhandshake.com, joinhandshake.com) The same network that once fed employer booths at campus career fairs is now feeding experts into model-evaluation pipelines. Handshake’s home page now describes the company as “the career network for the AI economy,” rather than only a student recruiting platform. (joinhandshake.com, joinhandshake.com) The work itself is the less visible part of the artificial intelligence boom. Model makers still pay humans to check whether answers are accurate, compare two responses, and create specialized questions that expose mistakes in math, science, law, or medicine. (joinhandshake.com, joinhandshake.com) Handshake is not alone in that market. The Information paired its surge with Mercor’s, and Wired reported last week that Meta paused work with Mercor after a data breach, underscoring how dependent major labs have become on outside contractor networks. (theinformation.com, wired.com) Handshake says employers still use the platform to recruit early talent, and schools still approve employer access for direct student outreach. But the company’s fastest-growing business now ties the student-and-alumni marketplace to a different buyer: artificial intelligence labs that need more human judgment, fast. (support.joinhandshake.com, theinformation.com)