Technology

Revelo’s LatAm talent network sees strong demand from US companies, thanks to AI

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.

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Technology

Trump says he’s found a buyer for TikTok

A group of “very wealthy people” is set to buy short-form video app TikTok, according to President Donald Trump.

“We have a buyer for TikTok, by the way,” Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday morning. “I think I’ll need probably China’s approval. I think President Xi [Jinping] will probably do it.”

Trump declined to share more details about the buyers, saying only that he would reveal their identities in two weeks (apparently his favorite unit of time).

Trump has repeatedly delayed a bill forcing owner ByteDance to sell the app or see it banned in the United States. In January, he said his “initial thought” was to create “a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership.”

He’s also said he was open to allies Larry Ellison or Elon Musk buying the app, although Musk seems like a less likely candidate now.

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Technology

Meta reportedly hires four more researchers from OpenAI

Looks like Meta isn’t done poaching talent from OpenAI.

Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported that Meta had hired influential OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal, and according to The Wall Street Journal, it also hired three other researchers from the company.

Now The Information is reporting four more Meta hires from OpenAI: Researchers Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren.

This hiring spree comes after the April launch of Meta’s Llama 4 AI models, which reportedly did not perform as well as CEO Mark Zuckerberg had hoped. (The company was also criticized over the version of Llama that it used for a popular benchmark.)

There’s been some back-and-forth between the two companies, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggesting that Meta was offering “$100 million signing bonuses” while adding that “so far, none of our best people” have left. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth then told employees that while senior leaders may have been offered that kind of money, “the actual terms of the offer” were more complex than a simple one-time signing bonus.

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Technology

YouTube’s mobile video editor is coming to iOS

Google is preparing to bring YouTube Create to iOS devices nearly two years after the video editing app launched exclusively on Android. Job listings reviewed by TechCrunch reveal the company is actively hiring engineers in India for the iOS development project.

The job postings show Google is recruiting software engineers in Bengaluru specifically to build the iOS version. The original Android app debuted in the U.S. and seven other markets in September 2023, then expanded to 13 more markets by February 2024.

YouTube Create provides free mobile video editing tools designed for content creators, offering features like stickers, GIFs, and effects for both YouTube Shorts and longer-form videos. Google developed the app after consulting with 3,000 creators to ensure it met their needs.

The app is Google’s attempt to compete with ByteDance’s popular CapCut editor. But exclusive Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch shows YouTube Create is quite far behind CapCut and another established competitor, InShot.

The competition isn’t even close. In the second quarter of this year, CapCut and InShot have been downloaded 66 million and 21 million times, respectively, on Android devices. In contrast, YouTube Create has seen fewer than 500,000 downloads this quarter and just 4 million downloads since its launch.

The user engagement gap is even more pronounced. CapCut boasts more than 442 million monthly active users on the Android app in Q2, while InShot claims 92 million. YouTube Create lags far behind with fewer than 1 million monthly active users.

youtube create maus — **Image Credits:**Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch

On iOS — the platform YouTube Create is now targeting — the competition is just as fierce. CapCut leads with 194 million monthly active users in Q2, followed by InShot with 25 million. Meanwhile, CapCut and Instagram’s Edit have dominated iOS downloads this quarter, with 28 million and 7 million downloads, respectively.

Despite lagging in the numbers, YouTube Create shows some momentum, with a 28% year-over-year increase in monthly active users in Q2, outpacing a 9% rise for CapCut and a 7% decline for InShot, per the Sensor Tower data.

“While boasting solid user growth on a year-over-year basis, YouTube Create has struggled to keep up with some of its larger, more established peers such as CapCut, with the latter having more than 10x the number of monthly active users,” said Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower.

YouTube Create may be building a more loyal user base, Yousef suggested. Rising active user numbers alongside declining downloads could indicate that people who previously tried the app are returning to use it regularly.

“CapCut coming out many years ago, coupled with the fact that it’s seamlessly integrated with its sister app, TikTok, likely plays into this material size difference with YouTube Create,” said Yousef.

Still, YouTube Create is facing some retention issues. Its 90-day retention rate — the percentage of users who downloaded the app and still use it 90 days later — was roughly 1% in Q1, far below CapCut’s 7% and InShot’s 4%.

Engagement metrics highlight the gap, too. Users spend an average of 38 minutes per month on YouTube Create, compared to 62 minutes for CapCut users. CapCut users also open the app more often, averaging 23 sessions monthly versus 11 for YouTube Create.

Geographically, YouTube Create’s user base is diversifying. India represented 67% of total monthly active users on YouTube Create in the second quarter of last year, but that share has dropped to 51% this quarter as the app gains traction elsewhere. Still, YouTube Create appears to be gaining stickiness in India, with daily-to-monthly active user ratios improving from 9% last year to, so far, 12% this year.

In addition to India, Indonesia has emerged as YouTube Create’s second-largest market, representing 21% of its global monthly active users. Germany (5%), Brazil (4%), and the U.K. (3%) round out the top markets.

The app is showing particularly strong growth in several other markets, too, with year-over-year monthly active user increases of 119% in Spain, 91% in South Korea, 89% in France, and 71% in Singapore.

“An iOS release of YouTube Create could absolutely help the platform grow its market share, though fierce competition in the space both from other social media-backed video editing platforms and native video editors will persist,” Yousef said.

Google did not respond to requests for comment.