While many tech companies insist that their employees return home and place an emphasis on building teams in person, they also turn to Latin America in droves in order to find developer talent, especially for post-training AI model.
Lucas Mendes, co-founder and CEO of Revelo, said that the platformis seeing an increase in demand for engineers who can assist with LLM training. Revelo facilitates the hiring process and payment for its U.S. clients. It has more than 400,000 developers registered on its platform. Mendes said that the recent surge in demand for Revelo talent is due to the next phase of AI revolution: post training LLMs.
Mendes said that there is a race to collect data, especially expert human data. This data can help LLMs perform better on very specific, high-value tasks. “Coding” is one of these tasks. Last year, we saw an increase in demand for engineers who can be effective experts. They also need to provide human data that will help their LLM code more efficiently.
LLM hiring accounted for 22% Revelo’s revenues in 2024. Mendes said that this demand often looks like companies looking for experts in specific coding language to fill gaps in their post-training.June 5
Revelo, Terminal, Tecla, and Near are a few of the companies that share the same goal.
The demand for post-training developers is the latest hiring trend, which Revelo has been able ride since its founding in late 2014. Mendes said that he founded Revelo with co-founder Lachlan De Crespigny in late 2014 because the battle for talent was fierce at the time. They thought that if they created an extensive network of vetted talent, companies would find the talent they need.
Revelo raised more than $48 Million in venture funding, including from firms such as Social Capital, FJLabs and Valor Capital Group. The company expanded beyond Brazil to include the rest of LatAm. Mendes said that the Covid-19 pandemic “massively” expanded Reveloās potential reach. Mendes said that suddenly, U.S. firms began to realize that they could have high-quality distributed teams with some of the engineers located in Latin America. “So, what would usually happen is that they would hire a few and really like the cost-quality tradeoff, and then say, “Hey, I want to find more of these. Where do I find them?” Mendes joked about how he hates being the one who goes against the trend, but the demand for LatAm talent is still high despite the tech industry’s move back to the office. Mendes believes that the demand for Latin American developers from U.S. firms has remained, because they fall into the “nearshoring”, or hiring workers in the same time zone as their clients.
Revelo has seen enough demand to acquire five other competitors focusing on LatAm talent within the last 30 month including Alto Paretisawas announced in March.
He said, “We are building that global talent base for the age AI and we will make more acquisitions in future.”
Becca, a senior writer for TechCrunch, covers venture capital trends and startup companies. She covered the same beat previously for Forbes and Venture Capital Journal.
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