Mercor competitor Deccan AI raises $25M, sources experts from India

Deccan AI, a startup founded in October 2024, has raised $25 million in an all-equity Series A funding round led by A91 Partners, with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. The company specializes in post-training AI model services, including data generation, evaluation, and reinforcement learning, catering to frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic as well as enterprises such as Google DeepMind and Snowflake. Deccan’s offerings include improving AI coding and agent capabilities, enabling models to interact with external tools via APIs, and providing products like its evaluation suite Helix and an operations automation platform. The startup operates from the San Francisco Bay Area with a large operations team in Hyderabad, India, employing about 125 people and leveraging a network of over 1 million contributors, primarily based in India. Deccan’s focus on India for sourcing expert contributors—ranging from students to PhDs—stems from a strategy to maintain high quality in post-training work