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UPDATED 2026.06.07
rl-list.com · Vendors · AfterQuery
#2

AfterQuery

Commercial
medium confidence
www.afterquery.com ↗ · Status: active confirmed · Founded 2025

AfterQuery is a San Francisco applied-research lab and data platform (YC W25) that supplies frontier AI labs with expert-generated human data (SFT, RL rubrics), agent/RL environments, and computer-use trajectories, drawn from a large network of verified practitioners. It publishes real-task benchmarks such as Terminal-Bench, VADER, FinanceQA, and IDE-Bench, positioning around capturing how domain experts (engineers, financial analysts, lawyers) reason.

Key facts
Headquarters
San Francisco, USAconfirmed cite
Headcount band
51-200reported cite
Total raised
$30.5Mconfirmed cite
Last round
Series A, $30M, announced 2026-04-09confirmed cite
SOC 2
unknown cite
What they sell
mixedconfirmed cite
Open source
yesconfirmed cite
Deployment
managed-hosted (data + RL environments delivered as a service to AI labs); open-source frameworks available (Harbor)estimated cite

Scale & velocity

Current headcount
~126-140 employees (Tracxn 126 as of 2026-04-30; LinkedIn/aggregators ~136-140)reported cite
Headcount growth
unknown
Open roles
24reported cite
Other locations
unknown
Distributed / remote
noreported cite

Research depth

Has researchers
yesconfirmed cite
Researcher count
unknown (2 open Research roles; benchmark-paper authors exist but team count not enumerated) cite
Backgrounds
Founders: Spencer Mateega (ex-Meta, ex-Google, Morgan Stanley/Silver Lake; Wharton/Penn), Carlos Georgescu (ex-Citadel Securities, ex-Meta, ex-Google), Danny Tang, Founding team / network cites prior roles at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Jane Street, Palantir, NVIDIA, Googlereported cite
Papers / benchmarks
VADER: A Human-Evaluated Benchmark for Vulnerability Assessment, Detection, Explanation, and Remediation (arXiv:2505.19395), Terminal-Bench / Terminal-Bench 2.0 (arXiv:2601.11868), FinanceQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Financial Analysis Capabilities in LLMs (arXiv:2501.18062; github.com/AfterQuery/FinanceQA), IDE-Bench (github.com/AfterQuery/ide-bench)confirmed cite

Capital

Total raised
$30.5M ($0.5M pre-seed 2025 + $30M Series A 2026)confirmed cite
Last round
Series A, $30M, announced 2026-04-09confirmed cite
Investors
Altos Ventures (lead, Series A), The Raine Group, Y Combinator, BoxGroup, Latitude Capital, Angel investors from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Superintelligence Labs, Microsoft AIconfirmed cite
Valuation
$300M post-money (Series A)confirmed cite
Revenue signals
$100M+ annual revenue run rate (company-stated, ~14 months from founding)reported cite

Security & compliance

SOC 2
unknown cite
Other certifications
unknown
Security page
unknown cite

Product

What they sell
mixedconfirmed cite
Open source
yesconfirmed cite
License
Apache-2.0 (Harbor RL-environment framework); other repos vary/unspecifiedreported cite
Deployment model
managed-hosted (data + RL environments delivered as a service to AI labs); open-source frameworks available (Harbor)estimated cite
Maturity
GAestimated cite
Notable customers
⚑Frontier AI labs (unnamed; company claims 'every leading AI lab' is a customer; press separately names OpenAI, Anthropic, Google as labs it serves, but without third-party confirmation) self-claimed cite

Buyer analysis

Best fit: A frontier or enterprise AI team needing expert-authored RL environments, post-training data, and realistic real-task benchmarks across code, finance, and professional workflows.

How we verified this

Confirmed this is the correct AfterQuery (YC W25 applied-research/data lab) matching the directory note 'benchmarks with real-task framing', Terminal-Bench (realistic CLI tasks), FinanceQA (real-world investment work), and VADER (real-world vulnerabilities) all align. Funding was strengthened to 'confirmed': $30M Series A at $300M post-money announced 2026-04-09 led by Altos Ventures (with The Raine Group, YC, BoxGroup, Latitude Capital, and lab angels), verified via the BusinessWire primary release plus SiliconANGLE/BuiltInSF/Finsmes; total raised $30.5M = $0.5M Crunchbase pre-seed + $30M Series A (a stray $46M aggregator figure was rejected as an error). Headcount sanity-checked at ~126-140 (Tracxn 126 on 2026-04-30), correctly in the 51-200 band, NOT 200+. The $100M+ run rate stays 'reported' (company-originated, unaudited). Notable customers remain 'self-claimed', no third-party-verified named lab; the 'every leading AI lab' claim and OpenAI/Anthropic/Google mentions trace to the vendor/press. SOC2, certifications, and security page remain 'unknown' (no trust page found). Downgraded open_roles_count and license to 'reported' (point-in-time / single-repo), removed unverifiable SpreadsheetBench 2, and corrected the founding-to-funding interval and maturity reasoning. Overall confidence: medium.

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Sources

  1. www.afterquery.com · 2026-06-07, Official site, products: SFT data, RL+rubrics, agent environments, computer-use trajectories; $100M revenue run rate claim
  2. www.afterquery.com/careers · 2026-06-07, 24 open roles across 6 departments, all SF; founding team prior employers
  3. www.afterquery.com/blog/terminal-bench-improvement · 2026-06-07, Terminal-Bench 2.0 improvement using Tinker and Harbor
  4. www.ycombinator.com/companies/afterquery · 2026-06-07, Founded 2025, YC W25, SF, founders, ~30 employees (older snapshot)
  5. techfundingnews.com/afterquery-gets-30m-from-altos-ventures-to-help-ai-u · 2026-06-07, Series A $30M at $300M valuation, 2026-04-09; investors; $100M+ run rate; founders; founded Jan 2025
  6. startupintros.com/orgs/afterquery · 2026-06-07, Total raised $30.5M across 2 rounds; founders Danny Tang, Carlos Georgescu, Spencer Mateega
  7. www.linkedin.com/company/afterquery · 2026-06-07, Public snippet: 51-200 band, ~140 employees, Software Development, founded 2025
  8. tracxn.com/d/companies/afterquery · 2026-06-07, 126 employees as of 2026-04-30
  9. github.com/AfterQuery · 2026-06-07, Public repos: vader, harbor, FinanceQA, IDE-Bench, anvil, mle-reasoning-environment
  10. github.com/AfterQuery/harbor · 2026-06-07, Harbor, framework for agent evaluations and RL environments, Apache-2.0
  11. arxiv.org/abs/2505.19395 · 2026-06-07, VADER benchmark paper, supported by AfterQuery Inc.
  12. arxiv.org/abs/2601.11868 · 2026-06-07, Terminal-Bench paper
  13. sacra.com/c/afterquery/ · 2026-06-07, Revenue/funding profile
Last updated 2026-06-07 · Every quantitative field carries a source and a confidence tag. Fields we could not source publicly are marked unknown, never estimated. See the methodology.