Organisation
Surge AI
Human-labelled data and reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback (RLHF) services for frontier labs, supplied by a large network of human annotators.
Surge AI is a data company that supplies human-labelled data and reinforcement-learning-from- human-feedback services to frontier labs, and reports customers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta. Founded in 2020 by Edwin Chen, a former Google and Facebook engineer, it grew without venture funding; Forbes reported in 2025 that it was valued at around $20bn in a secondary share sale, making Chen a newly minted billionaire. It is frequently named alongside Scale AI as one of the largest suppliers of training data, a market that grew more contested after Meta's 2025 investment in Scale.
- Category
- Data, training & services
- Founded
- 2020
- HQ
- San Francisco, US
- Funding
- Bootstrapped (no VC); valued at ~$20bn in a 2025 secondary sale, per Forbes
- Key people
- Edwin Chen