Surge AI

Last updated

Surge AI
Company type Private
Founded2020;5 years ago (2020)
FoundersEdwin Chen
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California, U.S.
Key people
Edwin Chen (CEO) [1]
Revenue$1.2 billion (2024) [2]
Number of employees
110 (2025) [3]
Subsidiaries Taskup.ai, DataAnnotation.tech, Gethybrid.io [1]
Website www.surgehq.ai

Surge AI (also known as Surge Labs) is an American data annotation company based in San Francisco, California. Surge focuses on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and annotating language data. Customers include OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Anthropic. [1] The company has been described as likely being one of the most successful data labeling companies in the world. [4]

Contents

History

Edwin Chen founded Surge AI in 2020, inspired by dissatisfaction with the quality of crowdsourced data labeling. [1] As of June 2025, Surge had been bootstrapped solely by Chen, with no previous external funding. [3]

Early projects had focused on search, recommendation engines, and content moderation. For data labeling, they developed a platform to match annotators to their expertise. These annotators reviewed the responses by generative AI models, including chatbots and text-to-image models, improving the model outputs by sharing information reflecting the annotators' expertise. [4]

According to Chen, by 2023, the company worked with about 100,000 annotators. [1] By May 2025, Surge had raised about $25 million. [5] In July 2025, Surge was in talks with investors from Andreessen Horowitz, Warburg Pincus and TPG Inc. [2] Its valuation has ranged from $15 billion to $25 billion. [2] [6]

Controversies

The Verge and New York Magazine reported in 2023 that Surge AI appeared to own multiple separate platforms for data annotation, including Taskup.ai, DataAnnotation.tech, and Gethybrid.io. [1] Data Annotation Tech has been criticized for its lack of transparency regarding its ownership [7] and unexplained annotator account cancellations. [7] [8] In May 2025, Surge AI faced a class action lawsuit that the company "deliberately" misclassified its data annotators as independent contractors, denying them employee benefits and improperly withholding wages. [5]

In July 2025, two documents from Surge AI had been leaked, one on model training and safety guidelines, [9] and another on websites that contractors training Anthropic models were and were not allowed to use. [10]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Dzieza, Josh (June 20, 2023). "Inside the AI Factory". New York . Archived from the original on June 20, 2023. Retrieved August 25, 2025.
  2. 1 2 3 Metz, Rachel (July 30, 2025). "Scale Rival Surge AI in Talks for Funding at $25 Billion Value". Bloomberg News . Archived from the original on August 4, 2025. Retrieved August 25, 2025.
  3. 1 2 Palazzolo, Stephanie; Weinberg, Cory (June 19, 2025). "The Little-Known Startup That Has Surged Past Scale AI—Without Any Investors". The Information . Archived from the original on August 9, 2025. Retrieved August 25, 2025.
  4. 1 2 Blum, Sam (July 2, 2025). "Bootstrapped to $1 Billion: Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen on How He Did It". Inc. Archived from the original on July 25, 2025. Retrieved August 25, 2025.
  5. 1 2 Hussain, Suhauna (May 21, 2025). "Surge AI is latest San Francisco startup accused of misclassifying its workers". Los Angeles Times . Archived from the original on May 21, 2025. Retrieved August 25, 2025.
  6. ↑ Vinn, Milana; Hu, Krystal (July 1, 2025). "Exclusive: Scale AI's bigger rival Surge AI seeks up to $1 billion capital raise, sources say". Reuters . Archived from the original on July 1, 2025. Retrieved August 25, 2025.
  7. 1 2 Castaldo, Joe (September 16, 2023). "Meet the gig workers making AI models smarter". The Globe and Mail . Archived from the original on September 19, 2023. Retrieved August 25, 2025.
  8. ↑ Henshall, Will (April 2, 2024). "Side Hustle or Scam? What to Know About Data Annotation Work". Time . Archived from the original on July 21, 2025. Retrieved August 25, 2025.
  9. ↑ Blum, Sam (July 15, 2025). "Surge AI Left an Internal AI Safety Doc Public. Here's What Chatbots Can and Can't Say". Inc. Archived from the original on July 23, 2025. Retrieved August 25, 2025.
  10. ↑ Rollet, Charles (July 23, 2025). "A leaked list shows which websites were used to improve Anthropic's chatbot — and which ones were off-limits". Business Insider . Archived from the original on July 26, 2025. Retrieved August 25, 2025.
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