AfterQuery
CommercialAfterQuery 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.
What's new
- 1 Sep 2026funding
Forbes reports AfterQuery is raising at a $3.2B valuation, YC's fastest launch-to-unicorn
Forbes reported a new round at a $3.2B valuation, more than 10x the $300M Series A valuation from April 2026. TechCrunch, Decrypt and TechFundingNews followed. Per Decrypt (citing Forbes), the round had not closed and no lead was named, though a lead was said to be lined up. A Forbes source said the company is profitable. Forbes notes that CEO Spencer Mateega posted on X in July that recurring revenue was in the 'hundreds of millions', up from $100M in April. YC partner Gustaf Alströmer called it the fastest any YC startup has gone from launch to unicorn.
Why it matters: A large jump in reported scale and funding for a vendor about 18 months old. The valuation is press-reported, the round was unclosed at the time of reporting, and the revenue figure is founder-stated.
- 30 Aug 2026benchmark
AfterQuery co-builds Legora's BAR legal-agent benchmark
AfterQuery's research team worked with Legora to design and validate BAR (Benchmark for Agentic Reasoning), which covers end-to-end legal work across 28 practice areas. AfterQuery ran tasks, shared failure cases and helped refine rubrics. Legora's BAR page says the one open-sourced case was 'co-created with AfterQuery'.
Why it matters: Moves the company's evaluation work beyond code and finance into legal, with a named partner that publicly credits it.
- 23 Aug 2026customer
AfterQuery says it was the sole data partner for Motif Technologies' Motif 3
Motif 3 is an open-weight mixture-of-experts model (about 314B total, 13.2B active parameters) under an MIT license, released on Hugging Face in August 2026. AfterQuery's post says it was the sole data partner. Motif's own model card does not name AfterQuery or any data partner.
Why it matters: A named sovereign-model lab customer. The relationship is also reported by TechCrunch, but the 'sole data partner' role is self-claimed.
- 7 Jul 2026research
Qwen3.5-9B improved on τ³-Banking with PivotRL using fewer than 250 tasks
The team combined on-policy distillation with PivotRL (turn-level RL), using 193 pivots from 50 solved teacher trajectories. The post reports pass@5 rising from 11.3% to 17.5% and pass@1 from 5.4% to 8.5%, with no statistically significant change on six general benchmarks.
Why it matters: A public, vendor-reported example of the company's agentic RL methods working with little data.
- 2 Jul 2026customer
NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra technical report names AfterQuery tasks in its GDPval training recipe
NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra technical report (dated 2026-06-09) says the office and workplace task teacher was trained on 'a training distribution from AfterQuery (AQ) tasks that share important latent structure with GDPval'. AfterQuery's case study says GDPval rose from 35.3 to 46.7 in the warmup ablation, using its Off-The-Shelf Office Agent Training Dataset.
Why it matters: A frontier-scale use of AfterQuery data confirmed in NVIDIA's own primary document, not only claimed by the vendor. The GDPval uplift figure is vendor-reported.
- 29 Jun 2026benchmark
SpreadsheetBench 2 released with AfterQuery as a partner organization
SpreadsheetBench 2 (arXiv:2606.29955, submitted 2026-06-29) evaluates agents on end-to-end business spreadsheet workflows. The project site lists AfterQuery as a partner alongside Renmin University, Aptura.AI and Shortcut.AI, with five AfterQuery contributors including Spencer Mateega. The best model reaches 34.89% overall accuracy, and debugging accuracy is 12.00%.
Why it matters: Resolves the baseline's doubt: AfterQuery's involvement is now verifiable on the official project page. The arXiv abstract page itself does not show affiliations.
- 8 Jun 2026research
+21.4% net win-loss margin on GDPval using on-policy distillation
The team distilled Nemotron-3-Nano-30B from Super-120B (+20.9%) and Qwen3.5-9B from Qwen3.5-397B (+21.4%). Training used 800 tasks from AfterQuery's Off-The-Shelf Office Agent Training Dataset, none drawn from the public GDPval set. GPQA, MMLU-Pro, AIME, LiveCodeBench and SciCode scores stayed within run-to-run noise.
Why it matters: Shows the post-training methods the company uses to demonstrate data quality to labs (vendor-reported results).
- 3 Jun 2026other
Essay on the enterprise 'last mile' (OpenAI DeployCo, Anthropic ServiceCo)
Sets out AfterQuery's view that labs must become enterprise deployment partners. No AfterQuery product was launched.
Why it matters: Signals interest in forward-deployed enterprise work alongside lab data.
- 28 Apr 2026partnership
Raine Search built for The Raine Group (also a Series A investor)
AfterQuery's forward-deployed team spent three days at Raine's New York office and built Raine Search, a natural-language semantic search over Raine's deal precedent library. It runs on AfterQuery's Atlas annotation platform. Raine's AI Strategy Lead, Alex Urbahn, is quoted.
Why it matters: The first public enterprise (non-lab) deployment, with a named client quote, and the first public mention of the Atlas platform. Note that Raine is also an investor.
- 9 Apr 2026funding
$30M Series A at $300M valuation led by Altos Ventures
Company announcement: The Raine Group, Y Combinator, BoxGroup and Latitude Capital also took part. The company states a run rate above $100M and a network of nearly 100,000 verified professionals, and says every leading AI lab uses its data.
Why it matters: Baseline round (already recorded). Run rate, network size and the lab claim are company-stated.
Founding team
What practitioners should know
For researchers
- Publishes methods posts with numbers (vendor-reported): on-policy distillation on GDPval (+21.4% net win-loss margin for Qwen3.5-9B, +20.9% for Nemotron-3-Nano), PivotRL on τ³-Banking (pass@5 11.3% to 17.5%), and a reported 5x Terminal-Bench 2.0 gain using Tinker and Harbor (March 2026).
- Authored or co-authored FinanceQA, VADER, UI-Bench, Market-Bench and IDE-Bench (arXiv) and App-Bench (appbench.ai). Partner on SpreadsheetBench 2 and Legora BAR. Not an author on the Terminal-Bench paper (arXiv:2601.11868).
- NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra technical report (2026-06-09) names 'AfterQuery (AQ) tasks' as the training distribution for its GDPval-style office-task teacher.
- The GitHub org (github.com/AfterQuery) showed zero public repos on 2026-10-05, and earlier repos such as harbor now return 404. The FinanceQA dataset remains public on Hugging Face. Other datasets are offered on request via research@afterquery.com.
For program managers
- Reported $3.2B valuation (Forbes, Sept 2026), up from $300M in April. The round was reportedly not closed and the lead unnamed. Profitability comes from an anonymous Forbes source. 'Hundreds of millions' in recurring revenue is the CEO's own claim on X (July 2026).
- Named customers: NVIDIA (confirmed in NVIDIA's own report) and Legora (Legora credits AfterQuery on its BAR page). Thinking Machines Lab and Motif Technologies are press-reported or vendor-claimed. The company also claims every leading AI lab as a customer (self-claimed).
- Forbes reports that AfterQuery 'works closely with some Chinese AI labs'. This may matter for buyers with data-governance or geopolitical sourcing constraints.
- Engagement model: custom data and environment programs for labs, plus a forward-deployed enterprise team (e.g. The Raine Group, also an investor). States a network of nearly 100,000 verified professionals.
- 39 open roles on the careers page as of 2026-10-05 (38 SF, 1 remote LatAm), including project leads for healthcare, legal, AI safety, STEM and consulting domains.
For data ops
- No public security or trust page (afterquery.com/security returns 404) and no SOC 2 claim found. The careers page lists Senior SWE (Security/Infrastructure) and ML Engineer (Data Privacy & Anonymization) roles, which suggests this function is being built but is not evidence of certification.
- Methods posts mention Harbor, Tinker and a Dockerized harness (IDE-Bench). No public API or docs found. The Harbor fork is no longer public.
- Contact for datasets and evaluations: research@afterquery.com.
Benchmarks & research
Products
Scale & velocity
Research depth
Capital
| Date | Round | Amount | Led by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Sep 2026 | Series B unsettled | undisclosed valuation $3.2B | – | source ↗ |
| Series B (reported; press framing, not company-announced; round reportedly not yet closed) · undisclosed | ||||
Product
Buyer analysis
How we verified this
Related vendors
Sources
- techcrunch.com/2026/09/01/afterquery-reportedly-becomes-y-combinators-fa · 2026-10-05, $3.2B valuation; customers Nvidia, Legora, Motif; Alströmer quote; does not name stage or lead
- www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/09/01/afterquery-becomes-ycs-fastest- · 2026-10-05, Original Forbes report (returns 403 to fetch; content read via the Forbes Australia syndication)
- www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/afterquery-becomes-ycs-fastest-unicorn · 2026-10-05, Forbes syndication: lead lined up but unnamed; profitable per one source; CEO X post on 'hundreds of millions' recurring revenue; Thinking Machines Lab, Legora, Nvidia, Chinese AI labs
- decrypt.co/377231/afterquery-ai-tradining-data-unicorn-y-combinator · 2026-10-05, Round has yet to close; lead not named (citing Forbes)
- techfundingnews.com/afterquery-reportedly-hits-3-2b-valuation-becoming-y · 2026-10-05, Series B framing; lead not disclosed
- www.afterquery.com · 2026-10-05, Products; NVIDIA and Raine named; no security or SOC 2 mention
- www.afterquery.com/blog · 2026-10-05, Blog index with dates (latest post 2026-08-30)
- www.afterquery.com/research · 2026-10-05, Research and benchmark list (VADER not listed)
- www.afterquery.com/blog/how-afterquery-helped-nvidia-hill-climb-gdpval · 2026-10-05, NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra case study; GDPval 35.3 to 46.7
- research.nvidia.com/labs/nemotron/files/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Ultra-Technica · 2026-10-05, Report dated 2026-06-09; p.23 names 'AfterQuery (AQ) tasks'
- www.afterquery.com/blog/afterquery-celebrates-the-release-of-motif-3 · 2026-10-05, Motif 3 sole-data-partner claim
- huggingface.co/Motif-Technologies/Motif-3 · 2026-10-05, Motif 3 model card: about 314B total / 13.2B active, MIT; no data partner named
- www.afterquery.com/blog/building-a-frontier-legal-evaluation-in-partners · 2026-10-05, Legora BAR collaboration
- legora.com/bar · 2026-10-05, Legora: open-sourced case 'co-created with AfterQuery'
- www.afterquery.com/blog/solving-the-last-mile-problem-in-partnership-wit · 2026-10-05, Raine Search; Atlas annotation platform; Raine quote
- www.afterquery.com/blog/deployco · 2026-10-05, Enterprise last-mile essay
- www.afterquery.com/blog/on-policy-distillation-gdpval · 2026-10-05, On-policy distillation GDPval results
- www.afterquery.com/blog/improving-qwen35-9b-on-t3-banking · 2026-10-05, PivotRL τ³-Banking
- www.afterquery.com/blog/human-expertise-reimagined · 2026-10-05, Series A post; network of nearly 100k professionals
- www.ycombinator.com/companies/afterquery · 2026-10-05, Founders, bios, headshots (bookface avatars verified as single-person photos)
- www.afterquery.com/careers · 2026-10-05, 39 open roles
- www.afterquery.com/security · 2026-10-05, 404
- github.com/AfterQuery · 2026-10-05, 'This organization has no public repositories'
- github.com/AfterQuery/harbor · 2026-10-05, 404
- huggingface.co/datasets/AfterQuery/FinanceQA · 2026-10-05, FinanceQA dataset still public (HTTP 200)
- spreadsheetbench.github.io/ · 2026-10-05, AfterQuery partner and five contributors
- arxiv.org/abs/2606.29955 · 2026-10-05, SpreadsheetBench 2 paper, submitted 2026-06-29
- arxiv.org/abs/2601.20886 · 2026-10-05, IDE-Bench paper (Mateega first author)
- arxiv.org/abs/2512.12264 · 2026-10-05, Market-Bench paper
- arxiv.org/abs/2508.20410 · 2026-10-05, UI-Bench paper
- appbench.ai/ · 2026-10-05, App-Bench leaderboard, built by AfterQuery
- arxiv.org/abs/2505.19395 · 2026-10-05, VADER paper (Mateega, Georgescu, Tang co-authors)
- arxiv.org/abs/2501.18062 · 2026-10-05, FinanceQA paper
- arxiv.org/abs/2601.11868 · 2026-10-05, Terminal-Bench paper: no AfterQuery author found
- www.afterquery.com/blog/terminal-bench-improvement · 2026-06-07, Terminal-Bench 2.0 improvement using Tinker and Harbor
- 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
- startupintros.com/orgs/afterquery · 2026-06-07, Total raised $30.5M across 2 rounds; founders Danny Tang, Carlos Georgescu, Spencer Mateega
- www.linkedin.com/company/afterquery · 2026-06-07, Public snippet: 51-200 band, ~140 employees, Software Development, founded 2025
- tracxn.com/d/companies/afterquery · 2026-06-07, 126 employees as of 2026-04-30
- sacra.com/c/afterquery/ · 2026-06-07, Revenue/funding profile