AfterQuery reportedly becomes Y Combinator’s fastest-ever unicorn, now valued at $3.2B
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AI training-data startup AfterQuery has reportedly raised a funding round valuing it at $3.2 billion, just five months after announcing a $30 million Series A at a $300 million valuation in April. According to Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer, this makes AfterQuery the fastest startup to go from launch to unicorn status in the accelerator's history. The founders, aged 22 and 23, were part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 cohort about 18 months ago. In April, the San Francisco startup claimed an annualized revenue run rate of $100 million and named Nvidia, Legora, and Korean AI lab Motif Technologies as customers. AfterQuery is part of a new wave of startups, following Mercor and Scale, that employ knowledge professionals to train AI models. Unlike those companies, AfterQuery focuses on teaching models to perform tasks the way professionals do, by encoding the patterns and reasoning of expert practitioners. Forbes first reported the round, and AfterQuery could not be immediately reached for comment.
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