AfterQuery hits $3.2 billion valuation five months after Series A

AfterQuery, a startup that builds training data for AI models, closed a financing round that puts its valuation at $3.2 billion, according to Forbes. The round comes just five months after the company announced a Series A in April that raised $30 million at a $300 million valuation – a more-than-tenfold jump in less than half a year.

Gustaf Alströmer, a partner at Y Combinator, said, “This is the fastest path any startup has taken from launch to unicorn status in the accelerator’s history.” The founders, now 22 and 23, were part of YC’s Winter 2025 batch, 18 months ago.

In April the company reported an annual run-rate of $100 million and said it works with several large labs. Publicly disclosed customers include Nvidia, Legora and the Korean AI lab Motif Technologies.

AfterQuery is grouped with newer firms such as Mercor and Scale that employ professionals—doctors, lawyers and other experts—to train models. Its approach differs, however: instead of focusing on answer accuracy, it trains models and agents to act like those professionals, a process it calls “coding the patterns, decisions and considerations of the world’s top experts.”

Forbes was the first to report the round. AfterQuery did not respond to a request for comment as of publication.