AI Recruiting Startup Mercor Rockets to $2B Valuation

last year, outwardly mercor appeared to be primarily a platform for hiring off-shore developers, essentially a tech enabled recruiting platform used by startups that want developer talent for cheap without the headache of dealing with development shops

their revenue was (and still is) based on taking a percentage of the hired contractor's eventual salary

I'd love to understand a few things about the company and investment excitement:

- How do they handle misclassification risk in the different jurisdictions they hire candidates from? For those unfamiliar, outside the US many governments have the power to look at labor contracts and determine if they are employee or contracting contracts

- How do they differ from TopTal, TryCrew, Bolto, Upwork, etc...?

- How does the mix of contract employments shake out? What % of engagements are for developing AI models vs just hiring a developer for a time-period or product engagement?

This almost reminds me of Scale AI, however instead of low-skilled data labeling for ML applications, it is high skilled expertise generation for the development of LLMs

Would be super interested in other takes