Current and former OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind employees are charging job seekers thousands per session on coaching platforms — and Leland, the best-funded player, is simultaneously publishing two funding totals that differ by $2.9 million, with no Form D on file.

Leland, the coaching marketplace where former AI lab employees charge job seekers up to $2,600 a session, is publishing two conflicting totals for how much money it has raised — and neither figure is backed by a Form D on SEC EDGAR.

TechCrunch reported Leland's $12 million Series A, led by Forerunner Ventures, on November 13, 2024, placing total funding at $17.1 million at that time. The same round appears on Leland's own blog — dated June 13, 2025 on the company's site — where CEO John Koelliker's bio reads "raised $20M from top investors like Forerunner and GSV." That is a $2.9 million gap between two figures Leland is simultaneously publishing, with no public explanation and no Form D filing located on EDGAR as of this writing. The Series A investor list is consistent across both sources: GSV Ventures, inVest Ventures, FJ Labs, Contrary, Peterson Ventures, and GSBackers, plus angels from Instacart, LinkedIn, and Handshake. Koelliker told TechCrunch the company was cash-flow positive before the raise; as of that reporting, Leland had 100,000 users across 70 countries and 50,000 coaching sessions in the preceding twelve months.

The funding ambiguity sits against a real and growing market. Andrew Quillen, a former product strategist at OpenAI and head of AI at Spotify, publishes Leland rates of $2,220 to $2,600 per client. That pricing reflects documented demand: Indeed data, as cited by the SF Standard, tracked an 11-fold increase in AI job postings since November 2022. Jesse Dwyer, a recruiter at Perplexity, told the SF Standard: "Every top AI company is flooded with applicants right now."

The other platforms in this space are harder to pin down financially. ADPList — headquartered in Singapore, backed by a $1.3 million pre-seed from Sequoia India's Surge — describes itself as entirely free, with all mentors donating their time; its 2025 annual wrap-up counted 602,934 unique mentorship sessions, not new users. Total platform users stood at roughly 800,000 as of mid-2025, per The Peak Magazine. Prepfully, founded in 2016 and headquartered in Amsterdam per its LinkedIn profile, has completed over 19,000 paid sessions but publishes no aggregate revenue, and no EDGAR filing has surfaced. Exponent, co-founded by Stephen Cognetta, claims more than 600,000 users (per the company; no third-party verification located). Cognetta told the SF Standard that demand for Meta coaching on the platform fell sharply after Meta's layoffs — the specific percentage has not been independently confirmed — and framed the broader dynamic plainly: "If you don't know how to use an AI agent, if you don't know an MCP, if you don't know how to think about agent orchestration, it's not a good job market for you."

The sharpest gap is at the labs. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have issued no public policy on whether employees may sell interview coaching or whether doing so risks surfacing proprietary hiring criteria. Some platforms already obscure coaches' current-employer affiliations to preempt any appearance of endorsement — a signal that participants recognize the ambiguity even if their employers haven't addressed it.

What the filings don't resolve: where Leland's extra $2.9 million came from, when or whether a Form D will appear, and whether any lab will move to regulate the side economy their own employees are quietly building.