General Catalyst Backs Coding Data Startup Proximal As It Reaches Revenue Milestone

Stephanie Palazzolo (AI Agenda, Exclusive): San Francisco data-curation startup Proximal is coming out of stealth with $15M seed led by General Catalyst at a $300M valuation (company told TI exclusively). Seed closed end of last year at negligible revenue; co-founders CEO Calvin Chen and Justus Mattern (ex–Prime Intellect) started ~last fall; now ~40 people. Chen says Proximal surpassed $200M annualized revenue in ~10 months—ARR method: revenue in the quarter so far ×4. Automated approach: use AI to generate coding tasks/tests (e.g., recreate websites and compare; multi-day agent-simulated engineer conversations) vs hiring hundreds of thousands of human experts like Scale/Surge peers; claims “software-like” gross margins (peers 30–50%; traditional software often ≥70%) and net-income profitability (won’t specify margins). Avoids competitive multi-labeler RFPs; instead evaluates frontier models for gaps and sells proprietary long-duration coding tasks (hours/days) that models like GPT-6 Astra or Fable-5.1 may still struggle with; works to prevent reward hacking via constrained specs and chain-of-thought checks. Comps: Mercor >$2B ARR (Jun); Handshake nearly $1B ARR (Apr). Side items in same Agenda: Cognition hires ex-Meta CISO Alex Stamos; EliseAI $350M at $4B (a16z/Bessemer) with >$200M ARR; SiMa.ai $150M Series C at $1.45B (Fidelity/Amplify). Caveats: company-stated ARR methodology and margins; exclusive company sources.