AfterQuery is a San Francisco applied-research lab and expert-data company (YC W25). It supplies AI labs with expert-generated SFT and RL data, rubrics, agent environments and computer-use trajectories, drawn from a stated network of nearly 100,000 verified professionals. Forbes reported it was raising at a $3.2B valuation in Sept 2026. NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra report names AfterQuery tasks in its GDPval training recipe. The company publishes or co-builds real-task benchmarks (FinanceQA, VADER, IDE-Bench, SpreadsheetBench 2, Legora BAR) and is adding forward-deployed enterprise work.
Raised
$30.5M ↑ $30M
Headcount
51-200
Founded
2025
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
partial
Backers: Altos Ventures (lead, Series A), The Raine Group, Y Combinator
Huzzle Labs is the applied-AI division of the London talent platform Huzzle (co-founders Ingmar Klein, CEO, and Amit Choudhary, CTO). It builds long-horizon RL environments (coding, computer use, enterprise workflows) and expert trajectory data for frontier labs, drawing on Huzzle's talent network, which it says numbers 300k+. In 2026 it expanded into its own small computer-use models (HuzzleWorld, 1B-8B, self-reported results), a domain benchmark (InsureBench, scores pending), and enterprise custom evals and models deployed on client infrastructure.
Raised
$6M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2020
SOC 2
Type II
Researchers
yes
Open src
partial
Backers: 10x Founders, Angel Invest, Emerge
Datacurve is a YC W24 data vendor that says it supplies frontier labs with expert-sourced RL environments, long-horizon tasks, agent trajectories, SFT demonstrations and off-the-shelf datasets. It is coding-first but now also covers data science, cyber security, ML and research. Data comes from its Shipd bounty platform of vetted engineers, which has SWE, ML and data-science tracks. It publishes DeepSWE, an open (Apache-2.0) long-horizon coding benchmark used in the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index.
Raised
$17.7M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2024
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
no
Backers: Chemistry (Mark Goldberg, lead Series A), Y Combinator, Balaji Srinivasan (seed)
Proximal is a research lab in San Francisco and Bangalore that treats post-training data as a core research problem. It builds long-horizon coding RL environments and data for frontier labs and enterprises, and it publishes the FrontierSWE benchmark and verifier audits such as CyberGym-Verified. In September 2026 it raised a $15M seed led by General Catalyst at a $300M valuation and claimed $200M in annualized revenue, which is self-reported. It also said it will expand into drug discovery, chip design and legacy software modernization.
Raised
$15M ↑ $15M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2026
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
yes
Backers: General Catalyst (lead, 2026-09 seed), Scribble Ventures (led an earlier investment, per its announcement), SV Angel
Collinear AI runs a Simulation Lab of sandboxed, stateful environments with simulated users (NPCs), tools, tasks and verifiers for agent RL training and evaluation. It now positions itself mainly as a supplier of training data, environments and evals to frontier labs across cybersecurity, software engineering, computer use and complex agent behaviour. Its CWE-bench defensive-cyber benchmark is part of the Artificial Analysis Cyber Index.
Raised
$10M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2023
SOC 2
Type I
Researchers
yes
Open src
partial
Backers: Engineering Capital, 112 Capital (11.2 Capital), B Capital
BenchFlow is a small, open-source-first 'frontier environment lab' in the Bay Area. It publishes agent benchmarks and environments: SkillsBench and ClawsBench, the env0 simulated workspaces, Robo Use and GenesisBench for embodied agents, and FrontierPhysics. It runs the PostTrain Arena for community-contributed post-training environments and maintains an Apache-2.0 runtime for RL environments, post-training and evals. It has event-level ties to Google DeepMind, Kaggle, Anthropic, Hugging Face and Prime Intellect.
Raised
–
Headcount
1-10
Founded
2024
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
yes
Backers: Founders, Inc. (confirmed via its portfolio page), Y Combinator (reported by aggregator only; no YC directory page found), Pear VC (reported)
Refresh (YC X25; appears to have grown out of Operative.sh) builds RL environments with verifiable rewards for coding, computer use (high-fidelity clones of software suites such as EHRs and enterprise apps) and 3D animation and simulation in Blender. Data ships in Harbor format. Public releases include BlenderBench, the Gauntlet 4K RLVR dataset (access by request), the open-source computer-1 harness in Harbor, and the trajectories.sh trajectory-sharing platform.
Raised
–
Headcount
1-10
Founded
2025
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
partial
Backers: Y Combinator
Vmax is a San Francisco RL company and applied research lab, founded in 2025 by RL PhDs Augustine Mavor-Parker and Matthew Sargent and backed by South Park Commons and Race Capital. It aims to automate reinforcement learning by turning proprietary data and evals into new environments, with long-horizon agents as the target. Its 2026 research is about generating RL tasks and environments automatically: PopuLoRA (self-play curricula), unix-ctf (procedural shell CTF environments) and PROPEL (probe-guided task generation, with a Goodfire AI co-author). Earlier, with Martian, it released 1k Harbor-format JavaScript tasks.
Raised
–
Headcount
1-10
Founded
2025
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
no
Backers: Race Capital, South Park Commons
Habitat Inc is a very early-stage San Francisco company (2-10 employees). Third-party market maps (Chemistry VC, SemiAnalysis, AlignList) list it as building reinforcement-learning environments for code and computer-use agent workflows, made of programmatically verifiable problems. Until mid-2026 its own LinkedIn described it as 'RL environments for white-collar work'. By October 2026 that tagline read 'Autonomous firms.', which may signal a repositioning. It has disclosed no funding, customers, publications or security certifications, and its website is a placeholder.
Raised
–
Headcount
1-10
Founded
?
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
?
Open src
no
Pedigree: Maxim Enis (co-founder), Williams College '24; prior Ramp association
Idler (YC S25, founded 2025, San Francisco) calls itself a frontier data research lab that builds evals and RL environments from real production work. Its public benchmarks are ShelfLife, a digital twin of a live multi-brand e-commerce company; ShelfLife E-Sim, a stateful retail-operations simulator; and CorpLaw, built from a law firm's anonymized data. It also offers private, on-request collections in long-horizon SWE, cybersecurity, recursive self-improvement and terminal agents. The roughly 12-person team is led by Dark Forest/0xPARC co-founder Ivan Chub and says leading frontier labs use its work, without naming any. A $9M Paradigm-led seed was reported by an aggregator in August 2026 but is not confirmed by the company.
Raised
$9M ↑ $9M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2025
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
?
Open src
no
Backers: Paradigm (seed lead, reported), Y Combinator (S25)
Scale AI is the data-labeling and AI-data incumbent that has extended into RL environments (simulated web apps, macOS/Windows-like desktop VMs and MCP-tool environments with expert rubrics and automated verifiers). It runs a large public evaluation program through Scale Labs (SWE-Bench Pro, MCP Atlas, Humanity's Last Exam, Remote Labor Index). After Meta's ~$14.3B deal in June 2025 (~49% non-voting stake) and Alexandr Wang's move to Meta, several frontier labs reportedly scaled back work. In 2026 Scale grew mainly in government and enterprise: the Pentagon CDAO agreement ceiling rose to $500M, it acquired ICG Solutions, and Francis deSouza (ex-Google Cloud COO) became CEO in August 2026.
Raised
$1.6B
Headcount
200+
Founded
2016
SOC 2
Type II
Researchers
yes
Open src
no
Backers: Meta Platforms, Accel, Amazon
Snorkel AI is a San Francisco company spun out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019 and known for the Snorkel weak-supervision project. It now calls itself 'the frontier AI data lab'. In 2025 it moved from selling Snorkel Flow software to an expert Data-as-a-Service model, and it now supplies expert agentic tasks, RL environments (computer-use, terminal and simulated-enterprise), rubrics and evals to AI labs and enterprises. It combines expert contributors with synthetic generation and agent-based QC, maintains Terminal-Bench, and co-authors or hosts agent benchmarks such as OSWorld 2.0, Agents' Last Exam and Senior SWE-bench through a $3M Open Benchmarks Grants program. It raised a $350M Series E at $3.5B in September 2026 and says its ARR passed $375M.
Raised
$585M ↑ $350M
Headcount
201-500
Founded
2019
SOC 2
Type II
Researchers
yes
Open src
partial
Backers: Insight Partners (co-led Series E), S32 (co-led Series E), Addition (led Series D, co-led Series C)
Modal (Modal Labs) is a New York-based, Python-native serverless cloud for AI workloads. It offers on-demand GPU/CPU compute, multi-node clusters with RDMA, managed LLM inference endpoints, and fast-booting sandboxes, including full VM sandboxes, which Modal says scale to 1M concurrent. It sells execution infrastructure, not RL environments. AI labs, agent companies and RL-data vendors use it to run RL rollouts, post-training and large fleets of parallel sandboxed environments. It integrates with Anthropic's Claude Managed Agents and Claude Science, Cognition's Devin Outposts and the OpenAI Agents SDK, and ships an open-source RL/SFT library (Modal Dojo).
Raised
$466M ↑ $355M
Headcount
51-200
Founded
2021
SOC 2
Type II
Researchers
yes
Open src
no
Backers: General Catalyst (Series C co-lead), Redpoint Ventures (Series C co-lead; earlier Series A lead), Lux Capital (Series B lead)
Mercor is a venture-backed expert marketplace and AI-training-data company. It supplies RLHF data, evaluations and reinforcement-learning environments to frontier AI labs and enterprises, drawing on a professional expert network: the homepage cites 30k+ experts, and Mercor's Deeptune post claims more than five million. It started as an AI-recruiting platform, moved into human data and RL, bought Sepal AI (Feb 2026), and announced the acquisition of Deeptune (Jul 2026), which builds simulated enterprise-app 'training gyms'. It publishes the APEX family of professional-task agent benchmarks. Mercor says it reached $2B ARR in June 2026, despite a March 2026 supply-chain data breach.
Raised
$492M
Headcount
51-200
Founded
2023
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
partial
Backers: Felicis Ventures (led Series C and Series B), Benchmark, General Catalyst
Prime Intellect sells an open-source-first stack for agentic RL: the Environments Hub (2,500+ community environments plus 365k+ unified SWE, terminal and search tasks), the verifiers, prime-rl and renderers libraries, Lab hosted RL post-training and evals (GA), Prime Sandboxes microVMs (GA), Prime Inference, and GPU compute. After a $130M Series A in July 2026 (TechCrunch reports a $1B valuation) it states $100M+ annualized revenue and 6,000+ customers. It also trains the open INTELLECT models and is the post-training partner in NVIDIA's Nemotron Coalition.
Raised
$150M ↑ $130M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2023
SOC 2
claimed
Researchers
yes
Open src
yes
Backers: Radical Ventures (led $130M Series A, 2026), NVIDIA Ventures, Intel Capital
Daytona provides secure, elastic, programmatic sandboxes (Linux containers, Linux and Windows VMs, and GPU sandboxes) that AI agents spin up in under ~90ms (vendor claim) to run untrusted AI-generated code in isolated, stateful runtimes with snapshot and fork primitives. It is a managed service with a Bring-Your-Own-Compute option and has been closed source since June 2026. It is an integrated sandbox provider for Anthropic Claude Managed Agents, OpenAI Agents SDK Sandbox Agents and Cognition Devin Outposts, and targets code execution, computer use and RL/eval rollouts.
Raised
$79M ↑ $48.274M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2023
SOC 2
Type II
Researchers
yes
Open src
no
Backers: FirstMark Capital (Series A lead; Matt Turck on board and listed as a director on the Aug 2026 Form D), Pace Capital, Upfront Ventures (seed lead, Series A participant)
Turing is a large incumbent supplier of expert human data to frontier AI labs. It claims 5M+ experts and work with '9/9 frontier labs' (both self-claimed). In 2026 it moved further into verifiable agent environments and evaluations. It launched Turing Frontier in April, set up the Turing Frontier Research Lab, and published benchmarks including CyberStrike (Harbor format, public on Hugging Face), KernelQuest, CEO Bench, SciCode++ and PLSQLBench (with Oracle, per Turing). It also contributed tasks to Terminal-Bench 3.0 and hired a research-heavy CTO, Ece Kamar (ex-Microsoft Research).
Raised
$300M
Headcount
200+
Founded
2018
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
partial
Pedigree: Microsoft Research (CTO Ece Kamar, ex-CVP AI Frontiers Lab)
Deeptune was a New York-based startup building managed reinforcement-learning environments ('training gyms') for computer-use and code, where AI agents practice and are evaluated on realistic digital knowledge-work tasks (simulating tools like Slack and Salesforce). It sold these pre-built environments primarily to frontier AI labs and raised a $43M Series A led by a16z (March 2026). In July 2026 it was acquired by Mercor; the team joined Mercor and Deeptune's environment platform now sits under Mercor. It is therefore no longer ranked as an independent vendor.
Raised
$43M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2025
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
no
Backers: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z, lead), 776, Abstract Ventures
General Reasoning is a London AI research lab (legal entity General Reasoning, Inc., US) working on models that operate over much longer time horizons. It builds OpenReward, a platform for serving RL environments (the vendor states 380+), and the open Open Reward Standard. It also ships open tooling (Firehorse, inspect-openreward, Harbor support), the KellyBench long-horizon benchmark and BackSearch, a paid point-in-time search API. It says its own language models launch in Q4 2026.
Raised
$10.9M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2025
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
yes
Backers: Entrepreneur First
E2B provides open-source Firecracker-microVM sandboxes for AI agents. It is offered as a hosted API, as BYOC, and since September 2026 as a self-hostable single-node package (E2B Embed). In 2026 it became a supported sandbox provider in the OpenAI Agents SDK and published integrations for Devin Outposts and Cursor Self-Hosted Machines. Vendor case studies show it used for RL rollouts (Paper Instruments) and large-scale evals (Arena).
Raised
$32M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2023
SOC 2
Type II
Researchers
no
Open src
yes
Backers: Insight Partners (Series A lead), Decibel (seed lead), Sunflower Capital
Runloop sells cloud VM-isolated devboxes and sandboxes for AI agents. Around them it now offers agent lifecycle tooling: the Agent API, Axons and Broker event streams, Agent Gateway and MCP Hub for credential isolation, Benchmark Job Orchestration with W&B Weave, Reflex background agents, and VPC deployment. It is execution and eval infrastructure for agent builders and training workloads, not an RL-data or environments vendor.
Raised
$7M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2024
SOC 2
claimed
Researchers
no
Open src
yes
Backers: The General Partnership (lead), Blank Ventures, Exponent Founders Capital
Mechanize is a San Francisco vendor founded in April 2025 by ex-Epoch AI researchers. It builds a small number of high-fidelity, long-horizon RL environments and evals for frontier coding agents, and publishes the open-source GBA Eval benchmark. It raised $9.1M at a $500M post-money valuation in April 2026. In September 2026 Business Insider reported that Google had completed a license-and-hire deal: co-founder and CEO Tamay Besiroglu and more than a dozen staff joined Google DeepMind, and talks had been reported at more than $1.5B. Mechanize continues under CEO Guive Assadi.
Raised
$9.1M ↑ $9.1M
Headcount
11-50
Founded
2025
SOC 2
unknown
Researchers
yes
Open src
partial
Backers: Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Patrick Collison
Morph (Morph Labs) provides snapshot-based VM compute for AI agents via its Infinibranch / Liquid Metal technology, which can snapshot, branch, and restore entire computational environments in roughly 100-250ms to enable massively parallel, reversible ('Git for compute') agent rollouts, evaluations, and reasoning-time branching. It markets the platform (Morph Cloud) as infrastructure for running and scaling agent/RL verification environments rather than as an RL-environment dataset vendor itself.
Raised
–
Headcount
1-10
Founded
2023
SOC 2
claimed
Researchers
yes
Open src
partial
Backers: Christian Szegedy (reported seed/angel investor; also Chief Scientist), amount undisclosed