Handshake vs Micro1

Handshake — Application · Private · 1 of 1 figure sourced  |  Micro1 — Application · Private

Relationship

TechCrunch names Handshake as one of Micro1's peers in the market for contracting domain experts to produce training and evaluation data for AI labs.

2 of 2 capabilitiesShared product typeSourced competitorTrain or fine-tune a model

2 of 2 capabilities — Shares data labelling and evaluation and observability.

Ludbee capability tags · from the product records

Shared product type — Both ship data service.

Ludbee product records

Sourced competitor — “Like its peers that hire domain experts such as doctors, lawyers, and scientists on a contract basis, Micro1 retains roughly 60% to 70% of that figure. ... Mercor (which hit $2 billion in gross annualized revenue this summer) ... Handshake…”

techcrunch.com · checked 2026-09-22

Train or fine-tune a model — Rivals on this job — Adapt a base model to a domain, or train one from scratch — the platforms, capacity and tooling that job needs.

Ludbee needs vocabulary · the scope on the sourced edge

Aligned comparison

FieldHandshakeMicro1
Sizenot disclosednot disclosed
Employees——
Founded2014—
StatusPrivatePrivate match
CategoryApplicationApplication match
Stack layerData serviceData service match
HeadquartersSan Francisco, USASan Francisco, USA match

Capability overlap

Shared · 2

Data labellingEvaluation and observability

Identical capability tags — the difference is in execution, not scope.

Products, side by side

Hand-checked pairing

Handshake

Data service

Handshake AIData service

A paid expert fellowship through which AI labs contract domain specialists to evaluate, review and improve frontier AI models.

Micro1

Data service

micro1 Data EngineData service

Human data infrastructure sold to AI labs -- expert human data, real-world RL training environments (Realm), and agent evaluation (Cortex) -- to train and evaluate frontier AI models.

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