Mercor’s trio of 22-year-old AI founders, including 2 Indian-Americans, beat Zuckerberg as youngest billionaires

San Francisco: The 22-year-old founders of Mercor, an artificial intelligence recruitment start-up, have become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, overtaking Mark Zuckerberg, who first appeared on the list at the age of 23 in 2008.

Founded by three high school friends—Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha—Mercor recently secured $350 million in funding, valuing the company at $10 billion, according to Forbes. The valuation catapulted CEO Foody, CTO Hiremath and board chairman Midha into the billionaire ranks.

Two of Mercor’s co-founders, Midha and Hiremath, are Indian-Americans who attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys secondary school in San Jose, California. Both were members of the school’s debate team and became the first duo in history to win all three national policy debate tournaments in the same year.

The trio now join a select group of young tech entrepreneurs whose fortunes have crossed the billion-dollar mark. Their rise follows that of Shayne Coplan, 27, CEO of Polymarket, who became a billionaire just 20 days earlier after a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. Before him, Alexandr Wang, 28, of Scale AI, held the title for around 18 months. Wang’s co-founder, Lucy Guo, became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire at 30, taking over from Taylor Swift.

What is Mercor all about?

Foody, Hiremath and Midha founded Mercor in 2023, initially with the aim of connecting engineers in India with U.S. companies seeking freelance coders. They developed a recruitment platform that enabled applicants to be interviewed by AI avatars and matched with companies in need of skilled talent. Along the way, the trio ventured into the rapidly growing field of data labelling, linking highly qualified contractors, such as PhDs and lawyers, with leading research labs, including OpenAI.

Midha, a second-generation immigrant, notes on his website that, “My parents immigrated to the US from New Delhi, India. I was born in Mountain View and raised in San Jose, California.”

Hiremath, who also attended Bellarmine, went on to study computer science at Harvard University, leaving after two years to focus on building Mercor. “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,” he told Forbes. “My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time.”

At the same time, Midha was pursuing a degree in Foreign Studies at Georgetown University, where Foody was studying economics. Both later dropped out to concentrate fully on Mercor.

All three founders are Thiel Fellows, a programme established by billionaire investor Peter Thiel to support young entrepreneurs who leave university to pursue start-ups.

Hiremath wrote on X that, “A year ago, our entire company fit into one conference room. Now, we’ve moved offices twice to keep up with our growth. We’re a team of more than 300 people globally, across engineering, product, and operations. I’m proud of how far we’ve come, and even more energized about where we’re going.”

Their remarkable rise places Mercor’s young founders at the forefront of a new generation of tech billionaires reshaping the artificial intelligence industry.