With the shift towards in-person teams and the return to office mandates by many tech companies, there has been a noticeable trend of turning to Latin America for developer talent, especially for post-training AI models. Revelo, a platform that connects U.S. companies with vetted developers in Latin America, has experienced a surge in demand for engineers skilled in LLM training.
According to Revelo co-founder and CEO Lucas Mendes, this increased demand is driven by the next phase of the AI revolution, particularly in the development of post-training LLMs. Companies are seeking experts who can provide human data to enhance the capabilities of their AI models, with coding being a high-value task in this context. In fact, LLM training hires accounted for 22% of Revelo’s revenue in 2024.
Revelo is currently catering to U.S. enterprises such as Intuit, Oracle, Dell, and various hyperscale AI providers by supplying them with skilled developers from Latin America. This demand for post-training developers is a reflection of the ongoing hiring trend that Revelo has been capitalizing on since its establishment in 2014.
Mendes explained that Revelo was founded in response to the tight talent market at the time, aiming to create a network of vetted talent in Brazil to address companies’ hiring needs. The company’s success led to raising over $48 million in venture funding and expanding its operations beyond Brazil to cover the broader Latin American region.
Despite the shift towards remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic, Revelo has continued to grow as U.S. companies recognize the quality and cost benefits of hiring talent from Latin America. The company’s nearshoring approach, where developers are in the same time zone as their client companies, has made these hires even more appealing.
Revelo’s success in meeting the demand for Latin American talent has led to the acquisition of five competitors in the last 30 months, further solidifying its position as a key player in the global talent market for AI development. As Mendes puts it, Revelo is building a global talent backbone for the age of AI, with more acquisitions on the horizon.
