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Sourcery · 3 min · Nov 10, 2026
DeepTune filled Mercor's gap in simulated work apps
Brendan Foody
DeepTune supplied simulated apps Mercor lacked for its RL environments, after a customer recommended the company as its top apps partner.
In this episode
Full analysis- 43:35Enterprise AI adoption follows inference spending6 min
- 12:09Scalable interviews help find rare high-quality experts3 min
- 5:30Mercor sells training environments, not just expert access3 min
- 36:55AI companies need different moats at each layer4 min
- 2:19Partner payment failures pushed Mercor to own expert payouts3 min
- 28:28DeepTune filled Mercor's gap in simulated work apps3 min
- 19:53Seed-stage customer failures shaped Foody's operating cadence4 min
- 15:28Mercor treats frontier research as a signal for wider adoption3 min
“one of the customers that we work with actually suggested proactively that DeepTune was their top apps partner”
Brendan Foodyat 29:24 · Sourcery
Takeaways
- Mercor had deeper expertise in creating environments' worlds and tasks than apps.
- A customer recommendation led Mercor to DeepTune.
- Foody described the teams as complementary in their scaling needs.
About this segment
DeepTune supplied simulated apps Mercor lacked for its RL environments, after a customer recommended the company as its top apps partner. Brendan Foody saw the teams as able to solve each other's bottlenecks.
Brendan Foody is co-founder and CEO of Mercor.
Co-founded Mercor, a labor marketplace supplying AI companies with expert data, paying tens of millions weekly.
Molly O'Shea, Host · Founder, Sourcery
Ex-Upfront Ventures investor; has interviewed Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey.
From “Mercor Raises $750M at $20B Valuation | CEO Brendan Foody”, Nov 10, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 28:34
slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. So let's talk about the state of the business today. So you recently had some big news. You acquired DeepTune. Yeah. Why did you do that? So it really ties back to what are the critical ingredients of the RL environments we need to automate everything in the economy, where the three parts I mentioned are, first of all, the apps, second of all, the worlds, and third of all, the tasks. And the thing that we have the deepest competency in is all of the worlds and all of the tasks, because that's what a lot of the experts do. And we have agents that help to augment and make that efficient. And our largest bottleneck was, how do we get the apps that clones of Salesforce and Adobe and Google Workspace that we can have all of the experts populate with the relevant content because naturally that is not what we started doing.
- 29:28
It wasn't as much of our comparative advantage. And so one of the customers that we work with actually suggested proactively that DeepTune was their top apps partner and they should just give us apps that we could populate as we were building out these environments. And so it's sort of ironic when like a customer initiates a partnership it's a good signal that there's something there and so we started working with um i got to know tim the founder better um and he was spectacular and that's obviously half of any of these things right just like who are the people that you want to work with for the next decade and it was clearly just a one plus one equals three kind of thing where we're setting up our new york office they were in new york they were very mission aligned culture aligned team and we could both solve one another's bottlenecks in scaling to solve important
- 30:21
problems for the world. And so we took the leap of faith and made it happen. Was this your first acquisition? This was our second, but it was much larger than our first. We also acquired a company called Seeple, founded by Robbie and Kat, who are also spectacular. But Tim had made a giant amount of progress with DeepTune and had just raised his Series A from A16Z, so it was a little bit further along. Do you have an M&A plan going forward? Or how do you think about this