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3 case studies found
Gojek
by Kevin AllouiGojek is a Southeast Asian super app that started as a motorcycle ride-hailing service in Indonesia and evolved into a comprehensive platform offering 30+ services including ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, payments, and financial services. By the time of their IPO (Indonesia's largest ever at ~$27-28B valuation), Gojek had 2.7 million drivers, completed 3 billion orders annually, and dominated the region through early investment in brand, operational excellence, and solving uniquely local problems that global competitors overlooked.
Handshake
by Garrett LordHandshake, a 10-year-old career marketplace with 18M students and professionals, launched a data labeling business in January 2024 by leveraging its massive network of experts (500k PhDs, 3M master students) to create high-quality training data for frontier AI labs. In just 4 months, the new business hit $50M in revenue; by 8 months they're on pace to exceed $100M ARR—rivaling their core business in annual revenue.
Mercor
by Brendan FoodieMercor is a labor marketplace connecting AI labs with expert professionals to evaluate and train AI models. Founded by 19-year-old Brendan Foodie in January 2023, the company grew from $0 to $400M in revenue run rate in just 16 months—the fastest ascent in history. The company operates at the intersection of the exploding demand for model evals and reinforcement learning, hiring highly skilled professionals (lawyers, software engineers, doctors, etc.) at $95-$500/hour to create evaluation rubrics and training data that improve model capabilities.