Our verdict
micro1 is a fast-growing, well funded platform: it raised $100M+ at a $4B valuation and reported a $500M gross run rate in August 2026. It publishes a talent referral bonus of up to $3,000. We have no incidents on record for it. We do not score pay yet, because there is no public pay index we trust, and we would rather say so than guess.
The facts, with receipts
Every row links to its source.
| Fact | Value and source |
|---|---|
| Company referral payout | Up to $50,000 per referred company |
| Default referral payout | 7.5% of the license price paid to the company |
| Referrer conduct | Referrers may not present themselves as micro1's agent, recruiter, representative or partner |
| Referral program launch | Launched at up to $25K per referral with a $5M fund |
| Who can sell | Companies with 30+ employees, US first, mostly English data |
| License price range | $100K-$2M+ per data package; over $1M for unique data |
| Data it licenses | SOPs, knowledge bases, internal docs, CRM metadata, project history and operations comms |
| Personal data | PII removed "when relevant" |
| Ownership and review | The company keeps ownership of its data and reviews samples before release |
| Company-data budget | Committed $1B over 12 months to buy company data |
| Latest round | Raised $100M+ at a $4B valuation |
| Sub-affiliate program | Pays 20% of what recruited partners earn |
| Talent referral bonus | Varies by role |
| Reported run rate | $500M gross run rate in August 2026, up from $100M eight months earlier |
| Talent referral bonus | Up to $3,000 per successful referral |
| Industries micro1 names | Technology; BPOs and recruiting firms; financial services; consulting; professional services; legal and compliance; healthcare administration; logistics and operations |
| Size micro1 names on its partnership page | 30 to 200 employees |
| Data micro1 names on its partnership page | Internal docs, SOPs and playbooks, knowledge bases, project management workflows, internal comms, templates, CRM and workflow metadata, task histories |
| What micro1 looks for | Well defined workflows that employees execute repeatedly |
| Spirit Airlines archive bid | Filed a late $12.5M bid for Spirit Airlines' internal data |
| micro1's lab customers | micro1 works with leading AI labs, including Microsoft, its CEO told TechCrunch |
| micro1's customers (reported) | Forbes reports micro1's customers include frontier AI labs, Microsoft and Amazon |
| Closed-company ads | Meta ads that ran 2026-10-09 to 10-14: "Your previous company's data could be worth up to $2M", for US companies that had 25+ employees at their peak |
| Live-company ads | Meta ads from 2026-10-04: "Answer 5 questions and find out how much your company data is worth"; "Companies are earning $100K-$2M+" |
| Referral ads | Meta ads from 2026-06-24: "One qualified referral could be worth $50,000", for companies with 30+ employees |
| Figures on micro1's partnership page | 100+ partner companies, $200M+ generated for partners, 100+ countries represented |
| micro1 partnership tiers | $100k+ for qualified partnerships, $500k+ for large-scale datasets, $1M+ for highly unique data; operationally mature companies with 30+ employees |
| micro1 data handling | PII removed when relevant, isolated pipelines, sample review; some datasets may get synthetic rewrites that reduce direct ties to the original records |
| micro1 Data License Master Terms | A nonexclusive, irrevocable, perpetual, sublicensable license; data deleted within 120 days of final delivery, but trained models are not deleted |
| micro1 acceptance and payment | micro1 has 30 business days after delivery to reject data, after which it is deemed accepted; the seller invoices only after written or deemed acceptance; either side can end the agreement on 30 days' notice |
| micro1 payout estimator | Asks employee count, years of data, headquarters, number of business entities, share of data in English and whether data is regulated or sensitive; indicative only, not a quote |
| micro1 deal volume | Said in its Spirit Airlines court filing that it completed more than 50 data transactions in the preceding 45 days |
| micro1 company details | micro1 Inc., a Delaware corporation, founded in 2022 by Ali Ansari; Fortune says it is based in Palo Alto |
| micro1 $1B financing | Says it is financing its $1 billion data commitment with capital from Citi and Hercules Capital |
| micro1 referral payout discretion | micro1 may withhold, delay, reduce or refuse any referral payout |
| micro1 domain | micro1.ai was registered on 2022-12-03 |
| micro1 closed-company ad | "Your previous company's data could be worth up to $2M", for US companies that had 25+ employees at their peak |
| micro1 estimator ad | "Companies are earning $100K-$2M+ by licensing anonymized operational data"; answer 5 questions for an estimate |
| micro1 summer ad headline | "Get paid $50K-$2M for your enterprise data" |
| Repeat payments | micro1's ads say deals have "opportunities to become recurring" |
| micro1 referral ad | "One qualified referral could be worth $50,000", for introducing companies with 30+ employees, established operations and strong internal processes |
| micro1 estimator questions | Six questions: employee count, years of data, number of business entities, share of data in English, headquarters (US, Canada, Europe, Other), and whether the data includes regulated or sensitive information |
| Team time, existing data | 1-3 hours to build a data manifest and up to 10 engineering hours to transfer |
| Second track | A "Workflows" track in which employees write prompts and give feedback, alongside the "Corpus" track for existing data |
| Retention and sample review | 60-day default retention; the company reviews scrubbed samples before data is released |
| Deals completed | micro1 said it had completed 50+ data transactions in the preceding 45 days |
| How the $1B is funded | $1B over 12 months to license operational data, financed by Citi and Hercules Capital, with deal tiers above $100K, $500K and $1M |
| Reported deal length | 4-6 weeks from first call to a signed deal, per a third-party write-up of micro1's program |
| Referring your own company | micro1's referral terms bar referring a company you own or work for without written disclosure |
| Google ads | 16 US ads on micro1.ai in Google's Ads Transparency Center, all video |
| Exclusivity terms | Not mentioned on its business-data program page or launch post |
| micro1 and recruiting firms | Lists "BPOs & Recruiting firms" as one of its eight example industries |
| micro1 and technology companies | Lists "Technology companies" first among its example industries, and asks for "Active use of modern software tools" |
| micro1 on original data | Says sensitive information is scrubbed before any downstream use and original datasets are deleted after processing |
| What most micro1 ads are for | Most of micro1's roughly 670 Meta ads seen on 2026-10-14 recruit experts; a minority ask companies for data |
| Name of micro1's program | micro1 buys and licenses operational data from companies through a program called Company Data Partnerships |
| What micro1 does with company data | Uses it to build reinforcement learning environments that mirror real business workflows |
| How micro1 describes itself | "Data lab to train frontier models & evaluate agents", with separate pages for experts who want AI training work and for data partnerships |
| micro1's products | Realm, RL environments that mirror real-world scenarios, and Cortex, a platform for testing and improving AI agents in production |
| Ads removed by Meta | Meta removed micro1 ads that ran 2026-09-09 to 09-12 and 2026-10-04 to 10-08 for not following its Advertising Standards |
| Removed ads | Meta removed micro1 ads that ran 2026-09-09 to 09-12 and 2026-10-04 to 10-08 for not following its Advertising Standards |
How we rated them
The rating for experts is a weighted average of the parts below, using only what is published. See how we rate.
Not enough public information to draw this chart yet. We only chart what a source supports.
- Pay level and evidence No data
- Work availability No data
- Payment reliability No data
- Onboarding fairness No data
- Reputation and incidents No data
What we know
micro1 for other readers
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FAQ
micro1: questions, answered
We do not publish a pay ranking yet, because we will only score pay from a public index of job listings and that index is still being built. Until it is published, pay scores on this site show as not enough public data rather than a guess.
Change log
- First published.