Three 22-year-old high school friends, two of Indian origins, have become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires after their San Francisco-based AI startup Mercor reached a valuation of $10 billion, as per a report by Forbes. The company, co-founded by Brendan Foody (CEO), Surya Midha (Board Chairman) and Adarsh Hiremath (CTO), raised $350 million in a new funding round led by Felicis Ventures. General Catalyst, Benchmark and Robinhood Ventures have also participated.
Each of the three co-founders has roughly a 22 per cent stake in Mercor, making them the youngest billionaires in the global tech industry. Mercor builds AI-powered recruitment and data-levelling systems that assist major artificial intelligence labs in training their models with human expertise.
“The thing that’s crazy for me, if I weren’t working at Mercor, I would have graduated college a couple of months ago”, stated Adarsh Hiremath, CTO of Mercor, in an interaction with Forbes.
From debate teammates to startup founders
Hiremath and Midha, both of Indian origin, first met at the age of 10 while competing in elementary school debate tournaments. They later joined the debate team at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, California, where they met Foody.
The trio went ahead to become Thiel Fellows, a premium fellowship started by billionaire investor Peter Thiel that sanctions $100,00 to young entrepreneurs who leave college to build startups.
Hiremath studied computer science at Harvard University before dropping out after his sophomore year to focus full-time on Mercor. “It feels surreal,” Food stated to Forbes, terming their rise “beyond our wildest imaginations.”
All about Mercor’s rise
Mercor was founded in 2023 with the initial aim of matching software engineers in India with US firms recruiting freelance coders. Over time, it shifted its focus to AI data-labelling and training, connecting skilled contractors, including legal experts and PhD researchers, with top AI companies such as OpenAI.
As per a report by Business Insider, Mercor now pays over $1.5 million per day to a global network of more than 30,000 human contractors who verify data used for AI model development.
At the age of 22, the trio are younger than Mark Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire at the age of 23, making them the youngest self-made tech billionaires in history.
Despite their success, the founders mentioned that they remain fully focused on scaling Mercor. “I leave the office around 10:30 pm most nights,” Foody told Forbes. “There’s not a lot of time to be distracted by things outside the business.”