AfterQuery Secures $30 Million Series A to Scale Professional Human Expertise for AI Models

The Shift to Professional Data

AfterQuery has secured $30 million in Series A funding to scale its mission of delivering expert-driven data for frontier AI models. Led by Altos Ventures, the round values the company at $300 million and includes participation from The Raine Group and Y Combinator. This investment arrives as the startup surpasses a $100 million revenue run rate just 14 months after its launch in early 2025. The company focuses on capturing the tacit knowledge that lives inside the heads of professionals rather than the public internet. By encoding the reasoning and decision-making patterns of experts, AfterQuery helps AI labs build models capable of handling complex professional workflows. This approach addresses the data quality gap that often prevents models from performing high-stakes tasks in medicine or law.

AfterQuery currently works with nearly 100,000 verified professionals across various high-value industries. These contributors provide the domain fluency and judgment calls that cannot be synthetically generated or scraped from textbooks. The platform uses a software-first approach to manage this data creation process meticulously in-house rather than outsourcing to mass-market crowdsourcing platforms.

Future proceeds from the funding will be used to expand this expert network and deepen coverage in specialized fields like legal tech and finance. The team is also focusing on building enterprise solutions to help companies implement AI for their specific internal workflows. These tools aim to compress years of professional trial and error into days of model training.

Founders Spencer Mateega and Carlos Georgescu started the company after seeing models struggle with financial reasoning during their time in Y Combinator. They are now backed by a strategic group of angels from top labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Their work suggests that high-quality training data is becoming the only true source of differentiation in the competitive AI landscape.