about 3 years ago, micro1 lost 60% of its revenue overnight and almost went bankrupt. today, i'm proud to share we've surpassed $1B annual run rate while remaining historically profitable. it’s been a special journey. we’re grateful for every struggle, moment, and person who has been part of it. we've taken a very untraditional path to get here. our core team is only ~180 people, spanning 14+ countries, and fully remote. many of our decisions sacrifice hundreds of millions of revenue and slow us down short term. but we believe they compound into advantages that are impossible to replicate long term. the long term is now. these are the 8 principles that made micro1 a leader in the data industry and will soon make us number one: 1.) human 1st AI: treat the tens of thousands of experts helping train models with absolute best-in-class care. our goal is to make AI training one of the largest, highest paying, and most enjoyable job sectors in the world. 2.) U.S. first: we refuse to work with adversarial nations, or export data that improves models against the interests of Americans. 3.) long-term research over short-term ARR: invest in deep research, products, and infrastructure for years from now, not just the next customer pipeline. 4.) proper incentives for intensely hard work: no arbitrary requirements like 996. inspire people to work extremely hard with outlier incentive structures instead of forcing weekend work. we’ve maintained close to 100% core team retention as a result. 5.) stay lean and global: we’ve reached $1B run rate with ~180 people, and intend to slow team growth significantly from here. exceptional talent is found around the world, and pedigree is the wrong thing to over-index on. 6.) execution alignment: company to retain a streamlined board so we can optimize for the next several decades, remain light-weight and dynamic, and take bold & calculated risks. 7.) abundant intelligence improvement: invest in building data generation models to make high-quality datasets and RL environments dramatically less expensive and more abundant. 8.) scale data on realism and horizon: realism brings the complexity of the real world into training models, while horizon extends how long models can work and how much complexity they can handle. both have enormous room to scale, and we’re pushing the limits of both. additionally: after surpassing $500M run rate this summer, we priced our Series B at a $4B valuation, alongside a ~$25M tender to give our early employees liquidity as we build for the long term. the round was led by Dream Ventures, a longtime supporter and one of our earliest investors, alongside Microsoft, Javelin, Flybridge, G Squared, Up Partners, and LG. we’re also grateful to be backed by incredible industry leaders, including Guodong Zhang (co-founder of xAI), Andy Fang (CTO of DoorDash), Igor Babuschkin (co-founder of xAI), Behnam Neyshabur (founder of Mirendil), Jerry Tworek (ex-VP of Research at OpenAI), and many more. data is on its way to becoming the largest industry humanity has ever seen, and we're certain this is just the beginning. best, Ali

Today micro1 is announcing a commitment to spend $1B over the next 12 months on the acquisition & licensing of enterprise data for AI training, with financial backing from Citi and Hercules. micro1.ai/blog/micro1-commit…

thanks for having me Julian & for this U.S. first AI question. 🇺🇲

Which personal agent is the best life assistant? Today we're releasing the micro1 PersonalAgentBench to help answer that, and we're paying real personal agent users to contribute to the benchmark. Personal agents can now book your flights, answer emails, and move your meetings around. That’s great, until one messages the wrong person or makes a purchase without confirming. Capability is not the same as trust. So we put four personal agents to the test: Instinct, Muse, Grok Bot, and Gemini Spark. We found that even when agents found the right information, they still often miss what matters, overshare, or make things up. To find out for yourself how your agent compares, you can join our benchmark. We’re paying the first 100 users to run our prompts and share their results.