Today, AfterQuery is excited to announce our $30 million Series A at a $300 million valuation, led by Altos Ventures, with participation from The Raine Group and our existing investors, Y Combinator and BoxGroup.

Since launch, our mission has been simple: deliver the best data to power the best models. In doing so, we can make expertise that once took a lifetime to build available to anyone who needs it.

Today, every leading AI lab uses AfterQuery’s datasets and reinforcement learning environments to encode, evaluate, and scale expertise across dozens of domains. In the 14 months since our inception, we have powered every lab to hillclimb core capabilities and benchmarks, from financial reasoning and software engineering to enterprise workflows and beyond. Since closing our Series A a few months ago, AfterQuery has surpassed $100 million in revenue run rate and is backed by angels from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Microsoft AI.

This round of investment is just the beginning.

The knowledge that matters most is the hardest to capture

We began AfterQuery with a simple observation: the most valuable knowledge in the world lives inside people’s heads. Until now, most of it also never left.

Think about what it takes to become genuinely excellent at something: the surgeon who reads a scan the way others read a page, the engineer who knows a system won’t scale without having to test it, the M&A attorney who spots the clause that will kill a deal in diligence. This intuition, this tacit knowledge didn’t come from a textbook. It came from decades of practice, of repetition, of failures nobody writes down and insights nobody teaches. True expertise lives in experience.

For most of human history, that expertise has been scarce, constrained by time and reach: the limits of a single person, a single career, a single lifetime. The best surgeon in the world can only be in one operating room. The best lawyer can only take on so many clients. Knowledge accumulates inside individuals over decades, often inaccessible to everyone else.

For the first time, we have the ability to change this. By encoding the patterns, decisions, and reasoning of the world’s best practitioners, models can carry that knowledge further than any individual ever could. We can scale expertise that took decades to realize, making it accessible to anyone who needs it. This is what AfterQuery is building toward: a world where insights that once took a lifetime to develop are no longer limited to a lifetime’s reach. When knowledge compounds beyond the individual, no longer bound by proximity or time, humans can go further – unlocking new levels of creativity, solving even larger problems, compressing years of trial and error into days, and making decisions with the confidence of deep expertise.

Data quality is the missing layer for professional AI

The distance between the world today and the one we’re building comes down to data quality. Our customers are the most sophisticated, innovative AI labs and technology companies in the world. Today’s models can ace the SAT, generate near-perfect images, and write entire dissertations. However, when put in front of the actual workflows that professionals do every day, they fall short.

Tomorrow’s models won’t just autocomplete sentences. They will help structure billion-dollar M&A transactions, design personalized treatment plans, synthesize case law that would take a human hundreds of hours to read in minutes.

Reaching this world requires training data and evaluation environments that reflect how professionals actually work: the edge cases, the judgment calls that can’t be scraped from the web or synthesized from first principles. Leading labs are locked in an arms race where compute is rapidly commoditizing and algorithms diffuse quickly through open research and researcher mobility. High-quality training data and environments are becoming the only true source of differentiation.

This is also the layer the field has chronically underinvested in, and the layer AfterQuery was built to fill. We are the first company to crack the code on consistent, high-caliber data quality across professional domains at meaningful scale.

A fundamentally different approach: research-driven, software-first

We believe human data represents the single largest opportunity in AI outside of the foundational models themselves. Training data quality is the binding constraint on model performance, and is the solution to the vast gap between what exists today and what next-generation models need.

Our approach starts with research: where exactly do models break down in real professional contexts? Why do these failure modes exist? We take a proactive stance and every domain has its own failure patterns. Getting a model to complete a professional workflow end-to-end isn’t a problem you solve once. The goalposts constantly move as the work evolves.

From that foundation, we take a software-first approach to data creation. Rather than outsourcing data collection, we custom-build the tools and workflows to manage creation meticulously in-house for every project. The result is higher-quality data, superior operational oversight for our team, and a significantly better experience for the verified expert contributors who power our platform.

We have come a long way. Today, we work with nearly 100,000 verified practicing professionals across engineering, medicine, law, finance, and more. They contribute the domain fluency that can’t be synthetically generated. Our software is what allows us to capture it consistently and at scale.

Join us in pushing the frontier of AI

The investment we announced today gives us the resources to go further, expanding our expert network, deepening our domain coverage, and continuing to push the research frontier for the most consequential technology of our generation.

Our team left roles at top companies across finance, software engineering, consulting, quant trading, and research because of their belief that advancing frontier models is one of the highest-leverage problems of our generation. The data layer that AfterQuery is building is the first step to this.

We’re hiring across operations, engineering, research, and more as we scale. Wisdom that once took a lifetime to build shouldn’t take a lifetime to find. If you want to work on a generational problem alongside people who care about it as much as you do, we'd love to talk.

Learn more about AfterQuery, and apply to join us: www.afterquery.com/careers