Bootstrapped data-labeling and RLHF platform for frontier AI labs
AI📍 San Francisco, CAFounded 2020
Current Valuation
Private
as of 2024
PRIVATE
IPO Outlookprivate
Is Surge AI going public?
No. Surge AI is private and has not filed to go public. There is no S-1 on file.
What is Surge AI's valuation in 2026?
No confirmed valuation is on record for Surge AI. The roster shows funding and investors where they are public; it does not estimate a mark.
Has Surge AI filed an S-1?
No public S-1 is on file for Surge AI.
Answers are derived from the roster record shown on this page — filing status, last round and confirmed marks. Where the record is silent, the answer says so rather than guessing.
Surge AI is a bootstrapped data-labeling platform founded by MIT alum Edwin Chen, providing high-quality annotated datasets and RLHF feedback to roughly a dozen frontier AI labs. Surge hit $1.2B in annualized revenue in 2024 without raising any venture capital, making Chen one of the wealthiest new AI billionaires.
Company Profile
CEO
Edwin Chen
Founded
2020
HQ
San Francisco, CA
Est. Revenue
$1.2B (2024)
Growth
Bootstrapped to $1.2B revenue in 2024
IPO Status
none
Fundraising Status
Bootstrapped · 6y 7mo ago
none
Secondary Market
Implied price / share
$23.02
Open interest
2
Secondary price return by period
Implied per-share price from private secondary transactions, as of Jun 2026. This is a point estimate, not a quote — the feed carries no bid, ask or spread, and a secondary print is evidence of what someone paid on that date rather than a live market. Compare across every tracked name →
Latest Funding Round
Round
Amount
Date
Lead Investor
Post-Money
Bootstrapped
—
Jan 2020
—
—
Vertical Intelligence — AI / ML
Open models
0
verified organization
Downloads (30d)
0
across all models
Followers
75
Attributed to Hugging Face organization "Surge AI" as of 2026-08-19. Open-weights footprint only — closed-model usage is not publicly measurable. Verify on Hugging Face ↗
Talent Signal
Hiring trend
● First snapshot
trend accrues with monthly sweeps
Open roles
29
via ashby
Product-build share
48%
engineering, research, product, design
Trajectory
steady
product-led hiring — 48% of open roles build product; the rest are go-to-market and G&A.
Actively hiring with no tracked executive churn.
Open roles by month
Open roles by function
■ product-building ■ go-to-market / G&A
Staff Fullstack EngineerStaff Product EngineerResearch Engineer, Coding Evaluation & Training DataSoftware Engineer, Coding Evaluation & Training DataForward Deployed ResearcherResearch Scientist
Counted from Surge AI's live job board as of 2026-08-17; role functions classified from posting titles. Open-role counts are an activity signal, not headcount. Refreshed monthly.
Founders & Key People
Edwin Chen
Products
High-quality human-labeled training datasets
RLHF and preference data for frontier labs
Domain-expert evaluation infrastructure
Competitors
Scale AI · Mercor · Handshake AI · micro1 · AfterQuery
AIData LabelingRLHFBootstrappedProfitable
Private-company numbers are not real-time. Reflects publicly disclosed valuations from press releases, news reports, and tender offers as of 2024. Refreshed quarterly.