Mercor

The challenge: Scaling operations at lightning speed

Mercor hires industry experts to train models that power the world's leading AI labs. When foundation AI model builders need human-generated data to train and evaluate their models, they turn to Mercor's marketplace of skilled contributors. Each client can have multiple projects — or AI models to train. The more projects Mercor can deliver, the more revenue they can generate from their clients.

When Dhaval Patel joined Mercor as a Strategic Project Lead (and the tenth employee), the company had less than a dozen active client projects. A year later, Mercor had over 230 employees in the United States, managing hundreds of projects across the world's leading foundation model companies, major tech enterprises, and top AI application startups — each needing its own reports to track the project’s progress and throughput.

The data team? It did not exist. Everyone accessed data the hard way: VPNing into AWS, using local tools like Beekeeper or TablePlus on their laptops. There was no central analytics platform, collaborative dashboards, or way to track the metrics that mattered. Every dashboard built meant pulling raw data and using Excel and Google Sheets to build dashboards, while waiting on a handful of technical people to build custom reports. For a company operating on hour-to-hour timelines, where a delayed decision could mean millions in lost revenue, relying on a few technical folks was not sustainable. They needed an analytics tool that would help them keep up.

The solution: Operational insights at scale, powered by Hex’s Notebook Agent and data apps

Dhaval had built his previous company's analytics on Hex and knew exactly what it could do. When he joined Mercor, he made Hex the analytical and business intelligence foundation for everything — Ops, Finance, Sourcing, and Sales. Now, Mercor runs analytics for all departments on Hex.

Hex became Mercor's analytics foundation — and their only analytics tool

Mercor uses Snowflake as their primary data warehouse to store operational metrics, but project tracking requires pulling from multiple sources, including: Google Sheets, Airtable, and the Mercor platform. Hex became the connective tissue, allowing teams to import data and build the custom analyses that drive decisions.

Today, Hex is woven into how Mercor operates across every function. New employees automatically get Hex access — a signal of how crucial the tool has become: finance runs all dashboards in Hex; the growth team tracks hundreds of active outbound campaigns and conversion analytics; product and engineering build dashboards to measure feature adoption and run experiments; the machine learning team uses Hex to train models and test hypotheses; and operations, Mercor’s largest function, relies on Hex dashboards to monitor project health across hundreds of active customer engagements simultaneously.

"What really excited me about Hex was that it allowed us to scale our data, giving non-technical folks the power to become technical." - Dhaval Patel, Account Lead

The Notebook Agent eliminated the technical bottleneck

The introduction of Hex's Notebook Agent changed how Mercor's non-technical team members engaged with data. Individuals who had never written SQL or Python before were now able to build their own dashboards. A seasoned finance leader — who took their last company public and had never written code — built all of Mercor’s financial dashboards using the Notebook Agent. A former government major from Harvard ran analytics for one of Mercor's largest accounts, and built all of her analytics from scratch.

"Now our team members can build reports themselves, which is faster than waiting for someone else to do it. This definitely would not have been possible without Hex." - Dhaval Patel, Account Lead

Hex-powered dashboards drive faster decisions and millions in revenue

Today, Mercor’s Operations team manages hundreds of active projects simultaneously across all its customers and uses Hex to monitor 60+ metrics for each project, measuring: throughput, efficiency, hours logged, defect rates, and revenue.

With the Notebook Agent, each strategic project lead can build their own dashboard instead of waiting on a few technical team members for support. This means that they can go from question to answer — no waiting in a queue, back-and-forth to clarify requirements, or delays between spotting a problem and having the data to fix it. The ability for non-technical users to iterate on reports in real-time, adjust metrics and views as they explore the data until they find the answers to their questions, compresses decision cycles from days to hours. Faster insights drive faster action. Over the past year, teams improved project execution and velocity, opening the team’s capacity to take on more projects, which unlocked over $100M in revenue.

"You don't know what decision to make unless you're tracking the metric. Hex gave us the flexibility to build custom dashboards for hundreds of customer projects," Dhaval Patel, Account Lead

The impact: $100M+ in revenue unlocked, and a company that runs on data

"If we didn’t have Hex, we might’ve left more than $100M on the table. That might even be an underestimate," Dhaval said.

Hex didn't just make Mercor faster, it enabled the company to scale. Self-service analytics removed bottlenecks and fundamentally changed what Mercor could execute, turning data into a competitive advantage that powered every decision across hundreds of simultaneous workflows and projects. Projects stayed healthy, customers stayed happy — Mercor has never had an enterprise customer churn.

With Hex’s platform, Mercor’s team:

• Increased $100M+ in revenue over the span of a year by compressing decision cycles from days to hours, which helped increase team capacity to take on additional projects.

• Used Hex as the primary analytics and business intelligence (BI) tool across the entire company.

• Eliminated the technical bottleneck: Dashboards are created in hours, not days.

• Managed hundreds of project dashboards with 60+ metrics to track throughput, efficiency, quality, and revenue.

• Enabled 100% self-service across functions: Finance, sourcing, product, engineering, and ML teams built their own analytics.

• Scaled analytics from 10 to 600 employees in one year while growing revenue and project count exponentially.

The bigger transformation isn't just speed, it's smart decisions using data. Mercor scaled to 230 employees, new enterprise customers, and hundreds of millions in revenue with Hex as their analytics foundation. They only hired their first dedicated Data Scientist three months ago, and their focus isn't firefighting ad hoc requests, it's building the semantic layers and data models that will make self-service with Hex’s agentic analytics even more powerful. The goal is to reduce friction between questions and answers and make every team member as data-fluent as a data scientist without needing to become one.

"With Hex’s agentic capabilities, we can move faster and the Data team can concentrate on higher-leverage work that unlocks the entire company," Dhaval explained.