USA (Commonwealth Union)_ At just 22 years old, the three friends behind the AI startup Mercor have become the youngest self-made billionaires in the world, overtaking Mark Zuckerberg, who reached the milestone at 23 in 2008. The company, which specializes in AI-powered recruitment and data-labeling tools, recently closed a $350 million funding round, bringing its valuation to $10 billion. Brendan Foody, Mercor’s CEO, along with CTO Adarsh Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha, now hold billionaire status.
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Mercor, founded in 2023, initially aimed to connect skilled Indian engineers with US companies seeking freelance coders. The team created a platform that uses AI avatars for interviews, but soon recognized a larger opportunity in data labeling, providing expert human input to train AI models for labs such as OpenAI. Their rapid growth has been striking: the company now reports a $500 million annualized revenue run rate, up from $100 million earlier this year, and has earned a spot on the Forbes Cloud 100 list.
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“It feels surreal. We couldn’t have imagined this even two years ago,” Foody told Forbes. Both Hiremath and Midha, who are Indian-American, attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys school in San Jose, California. There, they made headlines by winning all three national policy debate championships in a single year, a first in the competition’s history. It was also at Bellarmine that the duo first met Foody, sparking the partnership that would later become Mercor. All three founders were selected as Thiel Fellows, receiving $100,000 to pursue their startup full-time, a prestigious program founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel. “If I weren’t working on Mercor, I would have just graduated college a couple of months ago,” Hiremath reflected.
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The trio’s achievement adds them to an elite group of young tech entrepreneurs who have reached billionaire status at a remarkably early age. Their rise follows others such as Shayne Coplan, 27, CEO of Polymarket, who became a billionaire after a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange, and Alexandr Wang, 28, founder of Scale AI, who previously held the title. Lucy Guo, Wang’s co-founder, also made history as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire at 30. Mercor’s founders are currently at the vanguard of the rapidly evolving AI business, combining groundbreaking technology with entrepreneurial ambition at a time when most people are just starting out. Their experience exemplifies how swiftly the AI sector is generating new opportunities and rewriting the norms for young innovators worldwide.
