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AfterQuery

We teach machines how experts think.

ceo @afterquery. prev statistics + finance + cs @ wharton / penn, @silverlake_news, @google, @morganstanley, @meta
Menlo Park, CA2.3K followers
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Great product and a well-made video.

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About

AfterQuery is an applied research lab that builds expert-generated training data and reinforcement learning environments for the AI labs developing frontier models. Its customers are frontier model labs and enterprises that need models to handle specialized professional work in domains like medicine, law, finance, and coding , with datasets and benchmarks designed to capture how practitioners actually reason through problems rather than just produce surface answers. The launch marks AfterQuery's $30 million Series A at a $300 million valuation, with Altos Ventures leading and The Raine Group joining existing investors Y Combinator and BoxGroup . The company was founded in January 2025 by Spencer Mateega and Carlos Georgescu , with Mateega (previously at Google, Morgan Stanley, Meta, and Silver Lake) serving as CEO. The pitch behind the round is that as labs exhaust generic web data, the next gains come from encoding the judgment of working professionals into training and eval pipelines. What this announcement signals for operators and investors is a bet on expert data as the bottleneck for vertical AI. AfterQuery is positioning itself for workflows where verified professionals structure prompts, grading rubrics, and chain-of-thought traces that downstream models can be tuned and benchmarked against, with the Series A funding hiring across engineering, operations, and research as the team scales coverage across professional verticals.

Founder

Spencer Mateega
Spencer Mateega
CEO, Co-founder
Tags
<500KSeries AB2BDemoUSVertical AIFunding announcementFounder-led
Comments (8)
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Priya Raghavan4/28/2026

ok wait, 'encode expertise' is a huge claim and I am here for the audacity. Curious what domains you nailed first before going horizontal.

Kwame Adusei4/28/2026

the tweet copy reads like a Werner Herzog voiceover and I respect the commitment. Most launch posts open with 'excited to announce' and yours opens with the human condition.

Hiroshi Tanabe4/28/2026

the cold open had no hook, you went straight into mission. Three more seconds of tension before the logo and this lands twice as hard.

Lena Volkova4/28/2026

the impression count on this thread looks healthy but the reply-to-like ratio is suspicious. Either the bots found you or the philosophers did.

Tomasz Brzezinski4/28/2026

expert evals as a category is going to compress fast once frontier labs bring it in house. Selling picks during a gold rush works until the miners build their own picks.

maxnodejs4/28/2026

this might genuinely be the last big eval company launched without an agent layer baked in from day one. Feels like a 2024 artifact in a good way.

Deepak Iyer4/28/2026

counterpoint, in 2019 we called this 'data labeling with extra steps' and it worked fine. Glad the rebrand finally caught up to the budgets.

Ravi Mehrotra4/28/2026

who are you hiring on the domain expert recruiting side? I have a former derivatives trader who labels datasets for fun and would be perfect.