By Segun Adeyanju
Three 22-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha have become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires following a $350 million funding round that valued their AI recruiting startup, Mercor, at $10 billion.
The trio, all high school friends from the Bay Area and former debate teammates, co-founded Mercor in 2023 to connect engineers in India with U.S. companies. Their platform, which uses AI avatars to interview candidates, has since evolved into a major player in data labeling, supplying talent to leading AI labs like OpenAI.
With the new valuation, each founder now holds roughly a 22% stake in the company, placing their personal fortunes above $1 billion apiece, according to Forbes.
This achievement dethrones Mark Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire at 23, making Foody, Hiremath, and Midha the youngest self-made tech billionaires in history.
“It feels surreal, beyond anything we could have imagined two years ago,” said Foody, Mercor’s CEO.
All three founders are Thiel Fellows, beneficiaries of billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s program that funds young innovators who drop out of college.
Hiremath, who left Harvard after two years, said, “If I weren’t working on Mercor, I’d have just graduated a few months ago.”
Mercor’s meteoric rise comes amid fierce competition in the AI data labeling sector, recently shaken by Meta’s $14 billion purchase of 49% of rival Scale AI.
Mercor itself faces a lawsuit from Scale, which accuses the startup of stealing trade secrets, a claim Foody has downplayed.
Despite their new billionaire status, the young founders say they’ve made no extravagant purchases.
“I leave the office around 10:30 p.m. most nights,” Foody said. “There’s not much time for distractions.”
From teenage debate rooms to boardrooms worth billions, the Mercor founders’ story underscores a new generation’s dominance in the global AI boom.
