Private Markets, Angel and Secondary Investing, Sacra

Sacra

Private Markets, Angel and Secondary Investing

Bringing transparency to private markets so investors, founders, and employees can build on conviction. Sacra delivers deeply researched insights on the private companies shaping tomorrow's markets. By surfacing the data, context, and operator perspective that are missing from private markets today, we help secondary buyers and sellers price equity accurately and unlock liquidity for the people building these businesses.

Private Capital Markets

<ul><li>Handshake's AI data labeling business now generates a Sacra-estimated ~$950M in gross annualized revenue while the legacy recruiting business has declined to ~$150M.</li><li>Sacra estimates Handshake hit $1.1B in annualized gross revenue in April 2026, up 349% YoY from ~$245M in April 2025.</li><li>Handshake's growth has been pulled forward by 1) Meta’s minority acquisition of Scale AI, which led to customers like OpenAI & Google cutting ties, and now 2) Mercor's March 2026 data breach, which led to Meta pausing its contract, two seismic events that reshuffled budgets & vendor relationships among the 8 foundation labs & hyperscalers that dominate spend.</li></ul>

Handshake's AI data labeling business now generates a Sacra-estimated ~$950M in gross annualized revenue while the legacy recruiting business has declined to ~$150M.Sacra estimates Handshake hit $1.1B in annualized gross revenue in April 2026, up 349% YoY from ~$245M in April 2025.Handshake's growth has been pulled forward by 1) Meta’s minority acquisition of Scale AI, which led to customers like OpenAI & Google cutting ties, and now 2) Mercor's March 2026 data breach, which led to Meta pausing its contract, two seismic events that reshuffled budgets & vendor relationships among the 8 foundation labs & hyperscalers that dominate spend.

<ul><li>Handshake (2013) grew its campus recruiting portal & job marketplace to 18M students, ending 2024 at ~$190M in revenue (up 6% YoY) but with growth decelerating.</li><li>COVID dramatically accelerated Handshake's growth as remote recruiting exploded and in-person career fairs disappeared, driving revenue from $36M in 2020 to $75M in 2021 (108% YoY) and $120M in 2022 (60% YoY).</li><li>In 2023, frontier model companies drove massive demand for academically credentialed data labelers to power reasoning models and benchmarks in math, law & physics—driving the growth of companies like Mercor (Mercor $500M annualized revenue in August 2025)—with Handshake specifically well positioned to capitalize.</li></ul>

Handshake (2013) grew its campus recruiting portal & job marketplace to 18M students, ending 2024 at ~$190M in revenue (up 6% YoY) but with growth decelerating.COVID dramatically accelerated Handshake's growth as remote recruiting exploded and in-person career fairs disappeared, driving revenue from $36M in 2020 to $75M in 2021 (108% YoY) and $120M in 2022 (60% YoY).In 2023, frontier model companies drove massive demand for academically credentialed data labelers to power reasoning models and benchmarks in math, law & physics—driving the growth of companies like Mercor (Mercor $500M annualized revenue in August 2025)—with Handshake specifically well positioned to capitalize.

<ul><li>In 5 years regulation will be a defining force in AI safety and compliance work requiring human validation.</li><li>What really matters is net revenue and margins for durability.</li><li>Models are already reaching a point where they surpass the knowledge of the experts who trained them.</li></ul>

In 5 years regulation will be a defining force in AI safety and compliance work requiring human validation.What really matters is net revenue and margins for durability.Models are already reaching a point where they surpass the knowledge of the experts who trained them.

Jemma White, COO Of Prolific, On Why Humans Ensure AI Safety

<ul><li>The demand from frontier AI labs for expert data labeling has driven the growth of companies like Mercor ($100M annualized revenue in February 2025) to Invisible ($134M in 2024) to Handshake ($50M from AI data labeling).</li><li>Traditional boundaries between expert calls (GLG, AlphaSights, Tegus), market surveys (Gartner, Forrester) and user interviews (UserTesting, User Interviews) are collapsing into a single "primary research" category worth tens of billions—with life sciences consulting alone at $50B+—as AI abstracts away specific formats into agents that can run voice interviews & surveys, generate & extract content & data and produce completions & reports.</li><li>As foundation model labs have moved towards reasoning models which require PhD-level evaluation and fine-tuning, aggregating the supply side of verified & highly-credentialed domain experts across finance, legal, healthcare & other verticals has become key to serving demand—versus low-cost annotations from crowdsourced Mechanical Turk-style overseas workers.</li></ul>

The demand from frontier AI labs for expert data labeling has driven the growth of companies like Mercor ($100M annualized revenue in February 2025) to Invisible ($134M in 2024) to Handshake ($50M from AI data labeling).Traditional boundaries between expert calls (GLG, AlphaSights, Tegus), market surveys (Gartner, Forrester) and user interviews (UserTesting, User Interviews) are collapsing into a single "primary research" category worth tens of billions—with life sciences consulting alone at $50B+—as AI abstracts away specific formats into agents that can run voice interviews & surveys, generate & extract content & data and produce completions & reports.As foundation model labs have moved towards reasoning models which require PhD-level evaluation and fine-tuning, aggregating the supply side of verified & highly-credentialed domain experts across finance, legal, healthcare & other verticals has become key to serving demand—versus low-cost annotations from crowdsourced Mechanical Turk-style overseas workers.

Joe Kim, CEO Of Office Hours, On The End Of Crowdwork

<ul><li>Sacra estimates Invisible generated $134M in revenue for 2024, up 123% YoY.</li><li>Invisible works by routing model outputs through trained raters who score completions.</li><li>Invisible is now positioning itself to win where human-in-the-loop is mandatory for compliance.</li></ul>

Sacra estimates Invisible generated $134M in revenue for 2024, up 123% YoY.Invisible works by routing model outputs through trained raters who score completions.Invisible is now positioning itself to win where human-in-the-loop is mandatory for compliance.

United States

Career platform connecting college students and recent grads with employers and career centers

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Handshake (HANDSHAKE US)

$1.1B/year Indeed For Data Labelers

TL;DR: What started as a campus recruiting SaaS has fully inverted—Handshake's AI data labeling business now generates a Sacra-estimated ~$950M in...

Sacra

Handshake Vs Mercor

TL;DR: Handshake (2013) grew its campus recruiting portal & job marketplace to 18M students, ending 2024 at ~$190M in revenue (up 6% YoY) but with...

Sacra

Jemma White, COO Of Prolific, On Why Humans Ensure AI Safety

Like a lot of companies in this space, when Prolific started it was working on a slightly different use case. How did Prolific evolve to meet AI...

Sacra

Joe Kim, CEO Of Office Hours, On The End Of Crowdwork

I'll start with the origin story. You were at AlphaSights for a while. What were the experiences and insights you had that led you to start Office...

Sacra

Invisible Vs Mercor

TL;DR: With the rise of frontier AI labs needing human feedback to fix hallucinations and align model behavior, Invisible shifted gears from...

Sacra

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