While many tech companies are mandating that their employees return to their offices, and putting an emphasis on building in-person teams, they are also turning in droves to Latin America to find developer talent — especially for post-training AI models.
Revelo, a full-stack platform of vetted developers in Latin America, is seeing a new surge in demand for engineers that can help with LLM training, Revelo co-founder and CEO Lucas Mendes, told TechCrunch. Revelo has more than 400,000 developers on its platform and facilitates the hiring and payment process for its U.S. customers.
Mendes said this recent surge of demand for Revelo’s talent is driven by the next phase of the AI revolution: post-training LLMs.
“There’s a race for data, and especially expert human data, that can actually help LLMs be better at very specific high-value tasks,” Mendes said. “Coding is one of those tasks. And what happened last year is that we saw a surge in demand from [companies] building foundational models that are looking for engineers that can be effective experts and that can provide that human data to help their LLM code better.”
LLM training hires accounted for 22% of Revelo’s revenue in 2024.
Mendes added that often this demand looks like companies coming to them to find experts in specific coding languages to help fill gaps in the post-training they are already doing.
Revelo is supplying workers to U.S. enterprises Intuit, Oracle, and Dell, among others, including “nearly every major hyperscale AI provider.”
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Revelo is not the only company looking to connect U.S. companies to programmers in Latin America; other companies like Terminal, Tecla and Near are just a few with the same goal.
This demand for developers skilled in post-training is just the latest hiring trend that Revelo has been able to ride since it was founded in late 2014.
Mendes said he launched Revelo alongside co-founder Lachlan de Crespigny because the war for talent was tight at the time, and they thought if they created a network of vetted talent in Brazil, companies would be able to find the talent they needed.
The demand was there and Revelo went on to raise more than $48 million in venture funding from firms including Social Capital, FJ Labs and Valor Capital Group. The company also expanded out of Brazil and into broader LatAm.
The Covid-19 pandemic expanded Revelo’s potential reach “massively,” Mendes added. “All of a sudden we started getting inbound from U.S. companies who suddenly realized that you can actually have really high-quality distributed teams and have some of those engineers are in Latin America,” Mendes said. “So what would happen usually is that they would hire one or two and really like the quality and especially the quality cost tradeoff and say, ‘Hey, I want more of these, where do I find them?’”
While the rise of distributed and remote work has largely started to fade as companies return to in-person work, Revelo has still managed to keep growing. Mendes joked that he hates to be the guy that goes against the buzz, but the demand for their LatAm talent has not diminished despite tech’s movement back to the office.
Mendes said he thinks that the demand from U.S. companies for these developers in Latin America has remained because these developers fall more into the “nearshoring” category of workers outside the U.S. as opposed to “offshoring.” He believes the fact that Revelo’s talent is located in the same time zones as their client companies makes these hires a lot more attractive.
Revelo is seeing enough demand that it has acquired five other competitors focused on LatAm talent in the last 30 months including Alto and Paretisa, which were announced in March.
“We’re building that global talent backbone for the age of AI and there will be more acquisitions in the future,” he said.