Companies / Data vendor
Mechanize
Builds environments and evals for frontier coding agents, used as reinforcement learning signals ("We build environments and evals for frontier coding agents"). Recorded here: what it sells, in its own words, 3 funding events and 6 public prices.
mechanize.workLatest record 15 Oct 2026
What Mechanize sells
In its own words, read on its own site 15 Oct 2026. On the vendor register
- What it sells
RL environments: “Mechanize is a software company that builds RL environments and sells them to the leading AI labs.” mechanize.work
Evaluations and benchmarks: “We build environments and evals for frontier coding agents.” mechanize.work
Datasets: “Today we’re announcing Mechanize, a startup focused on developing virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data that will enable the full automation of the economy.” mechanize.work
Simulation: “We will achieve this by creating simulated environments and evaluations that capture the full scope of what people do at their jobs.” mechanize.work
- Where its data comes from
Made by experts and contractors: “Currently, our model for producing these tasks involves each task being owned by a single engineer, who is responsible for all phases of the task lifecycle” mechanize.work
- Buys data from owners
- Its pages do not say it does.
- Areas its pages name
- Coding
Public prices involving Mechanize
- Software engineer at Mechanize, hired to build environments and evals for frontier coding agents
Undated live page. Base salary only; the 2025 press figure of $500,000 likely included more than base. Labour cost behind a vendor that sells RL tasks to labs.
The payer's own page, Mechanize, Apply page
$300K–$400K salary · equity · bonusper year (base salary, plus equity and bonus)
- Labour cost of one good RL coding task at Mechanize: an engineer paid $400k+ a year expected to make one good task a week
A builder's own production cost per task, reported by SemiAnalysis: salary only, before compute, review and margin. It sits above the $5,000+ labs are said to pay per coding task, so Mechanize's tasks must sell above that floor or be sold more than once.
Press report, SemiAnalysis, The Future of Meta Superintelligence: A 1 Year Progress Update
$400k+ per year ... 1 good task per weekper engineer-year, at one good task per week
- Software engineering intern at Mechanize designing RL tasks (prompt, environment and automated grader)
Intern rate, already above most expert contractor rates for environment work; each task is a self-contained software challenge with its own grader.
The payer's own page, Mechanize on Ashby, Software Engineering Intern
$150 per hourper hour
- Software engineer salary at Mechanize for building RL environments (2025 report)
Employee salary, not a contractor rate; TechCrunch contrasts it with hourly contractor pay at Scale AI or Surge.
Press report, TechCrunch, Silicon Valley bets big on environments to train AI agents
$500,000 salariesper year (salary)
- Recommended spend per RL task for frontier post-training (Mechanize analysis)
An argument from compute cost by a company that sells RL environments, not an observed price: about $480 of compute per task per training run, and $2,400 over a task's life at five reuses.
A vendor's published price guide, Mechanize
~$500 per RL task now, rising roughly fivefold to a few thousand dollars within a yearper RL task
- Lifetime compute for one frontier RL task (500,000 tokens per run, group size 64, five reuses, at Grok 4 output-token prices; Mechanize analysis)
A modelled compute cost a lab bears when it trains on one task, not a price paid for the task. Written by a company that sells RL environments, to argue labs should spend at least about $500 per task.
A vendor's published price guide, Mechanize, Cheap RL tasks will waste compute
$2,400 for each RL taskper RL task, compute over its life
Funding and acquisitions
- 11 Sep 2026EventAcquired by GoogleAmount$1.5B
- 24 Apr 2026EventfundingAmount$9.1MValuation$500M
- 17 Apr 2025Eventfunding
Cite this
AIData.Broker, “Mechanize in the AI training data market”, reviewed 15 Oct 2026. https://www.aidata.markets/companies/mechanize
Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 if you credit AIData.Broker and link to this page. Each row names the publication that stated it, and words quoted from a source keep that source's own terms.