An AI Training Data Startup Just Became Y Combinator's Fastest-Ever Unicorn

In brief

• AfterQuery has reached a $3.2 billion valuation, up from $300 million five months ago, Forbes reported, citing two people with direct knowledge of the deal.
• Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer called it the fastest run from launch to unicorn status—startup shorthand for a private company worth over $1 billion—in the accelerator's history.
• Founders Spencer Mateega, 23, and Carlos Georgescu, 22, pay doctors, lawyers, engineers, and financial analysts to generate the kind of expert judgment data that AI labs can no longer scrape off the open internet.

AfterQuery, an 18-month-old AI startup, has reached a $3.2 billion valuation in a new funding round, Forbes reported Monday. That figure is more than ten times the $300 million valuation it carried five months earlier, when it closed a $30 million Series A—an early funding round where a startup sells a slice of itself for growth capital.

The jump makes AfterQuery the fastest startup in Y Combinator's history to go from inception to unicorn status, according to YC partner Gustaf Alströmer. AfterQuery declined to comment on the report. One of Forbes' sources said the company is already profitable and has lined up a lead investor for the round.