Brendan Foody is the CEO of Mercor. Taylor Hill/FilmMagic via Getty Images

What happens when a company spends more on AI than on its workers? Mercor's CEO says his startup is already finding out.

"Right now we're spending more on tokens for our internal agents than we are on employee head count," Foody said during an appearance on the "20VC" podcast on Monday.

When host Harry Stebbings asked if Mercor's token spending on AI agents exceeded salaries, Foody replied: "That's correct. It's pretty incredible."

Mercor — a $10 billion startup that helps companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic train AI models through a network of its human experts — has become one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI ecosystem since its 2023 launch.

As of October 2025, per PitchBook, it had around 300 employees.…