Handshake started in 2014 as a college recruiting platform — a three-sided marketplace connecting students and recent graduates, universities, and employers. It still operates that core business: 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers (including 100% of the Fortune 50), and 1,600 academic institutions use it to post jobs, discover candidates, and manage early-career hiring. In January 2025, Handshake "refounded" itself by launching Handshake AI (HAI), a human data-labeling and model evaluation business. HAI recruits domain experts — STEM PhDs, physicists, coders, lawyers — from its own network to generate high-difficulty training data, run evaluations, create benchmarks, and red-team frontier AI models for labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Experts earn $40–$125/hour. Handshake handles sourcing, quality control, and delivery. AI labs pay for verified expert output they cannot get from generic crowd-sourcing platforms. The AI data business has grown from near zero to ~$1B in annualized gross revenue in roughly 15 months, and it now dwarfs the original recruiting software in scale and growth rate.