Three American college dropouts, two of whom have Indian roots, have become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. At just 22 years of age, these founders have beaten Mark Zuckerberg, who first became a billionaire at 23 two decades ago.
Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha are the founders of Mercor, a startup that helps improve top AI models. According to a Forbes report, the three founders have recently secured $350 million (Rs 3,107.27 crore) in funding, valuing the company at $10 billion (Rs 88,779 crore).
Let’s take a closer look.
What Mercor does
Mercor is a startup based in San Francisco, United States, that helps Silicon Valley’s AI labs to train their models.
It initially began as a human resources and recruiting startup that deployed artificial intelligence (AI) to automate resume screening, evaluate candidates and match them with the best roles, reported The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
The main focus was on technical jobs, ranging from software engineers to mathematicians. The company’s aim was to match engineers in India with American companies seeking freelance coders.
This led to Mercor unintentionally creating a network of specialised workers that the biggest AI companies are looking to chase to train their chatbots and keep competing in the AI race.
Amid rising demand from
AI companies to improve their models, Mercor extended its operations to recruit contractors to assess the quality of chatbot replies.
The startup further expanded its network of contractors to include lawyers, doctors, bankers and journalists, as per WSJ.
As part of this strategy shift, Mercor hired Uber’s former chief product officer, Sundeep Jain, as its first president in May.
Meet the Gen Z founders
Mercor chief executive (CEO) Brendan Foody, chief technology officer (CTO) Adarsh Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha are high school friends from the Bay Area.
The trio, who are the children of software engineers, dropped out a few years into college to start Mercor in 2023. The three founders appeared on the Forbes 2025 Under 30 list.
Foody’s mother worked for Meta’s real estate team, while his father founded a graphics interface company in the 90s before venturing into startup advising, as per the Forbes report.
At just 16, Foody started a company to get his friends promotions on Amazon Web Services, charging them $500 (Rs 44389.5) each.
Hiremath and Midha, the Indian-American founders of Mercor, met when they were 10 years old, competing in elementary school debate tournaments. They met Foody in high school debate.
Hiremath attended Harvard University, where he got interested in labour markets. He also carried out research for Larry Summers, former US Treasury Secretary and current OpenAI board member. Summers later invested in Mercor, reported Forbes.
All three founders are Thiel Fellows, a programme created by conservative billionaire investor Peter Thiel that funds companies started by college dropouts.
“The thing that’s crazy for me is, if I weren’t working on Mercor, I would have just graduated college a couple months ago,” Hiremath, who spent two years at Harvard before dropping out, told Forbes. “My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time.”
How Mercor’s founders became billionaires
Mercor made a fortune amid a disruption in the data labelling industry in recent months.
In June,
Meta announced it was buying a 49 per cent stake in Scale AI, one of the most popular data-labelling startups, for $14 billion (Rs 1.24 lakh crore). It also poached its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to help lead Meta’s AI efforts.
The move, however, raised concerns among Scale’s customers and competitors about the startup’s neutrality and protecting customer data after Meta’s investment.
This came as a blessing for the rival Mercor, whose revenue has quadrupled since Meta invested in Scale, people familiar with its business told WSJ.
However, the competition between data-labelling startups stirred a controversy in September.
Scale sued Mercor, accusing the company of stealing trade secrets. It also sued a former Scale employee, who had left to work for Mercor, alleging he shared more than 100 confidential documents with his new employer.
“It’s not something we spend a lot of time thinking about,” CEO Foody told Forbes when asked about the complaint.
Mercor, which has OpenAI and Anthropic among its customers, last week announced a $350 million funding round led by Felicis Ventures, which took the company’s valuation to $10 billion.
Existing investors like Benchmark and General Catalyst, as well as Robinhood Ventures, took part in the funding round.
This has made Foody, Hiremath and Midha the newest billionaires of the AI boom, each with a roughly 22 per cent stake in the company, according to Forbes estimates.
“It’s definitely crazy,” Foody said. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.”
With inputs from agencies
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