AfterQuery, a startup that trains AI models to think like working professionals, has raised a round valuing it at $3.2B. The jump lands just five months after its $30M Series A at a $300M valuation, a tenfold increase in under half a year.
The accelerator’s partner Gustaf Alströmer calls the rise the quickest launch-to-unicorn arc Y Combinator has seen in its history. The founders, who are 22 and 23, sat in the Winter 2025 batch roughly 18 months ago. Forbes broke the news of the round, and AfterQuery had not responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment when the story ran.
AfterQuery sits in the fast-growing corner of AI that hires knowledge workers such as doctors and lawyers to shape model behavior. Unlike rivals that tune accuracy, AfterQuery says it encodes how specialists make decisions, so models and agents complete tasks the way experienced practitioners would.
The San Francisco company said in April that it had reached a $100M annualized revenue run rate. It counts Nvidia, French AI lab Legora and Korea’s Motif Technologies among customers.
The valuation surge underscores investor hunger for data startups that sit between the model labs and the expertise those labs cannot generate in-house, a space also occupied by Mercor and Scale AI.
