Three 22-year-olds, including two of Indian-origin, have become the world’s youngest self made billionaires, going past Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, who was 23 when he entered the billionaire’s club.
Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha and Brendan Foody, the co-founders of Mercor, a San Francisco-based AI recruiting platform, achieved the feat recently, after their company received a USD 350 million funding based on a USD 10 billion value, as per reports.
Their current net worth is over USD 2 billion each.
Hiremath’s parents went to the US from Karnataka, while Midha’s Indian heritage traces back to New Delhi.
As per reports, the trio met in Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys Jesuit school in San Jose, and bonded over late-night preparations for national debate tournaments.
While they all went to different universities — Foody to Georgetown for economics, Hiremath to Harvard for computer science, and Midha to Georgetown for foreign service, they reunited later. Mercor was launched in early 2023, during their sophomore years.
Mercor began as a small online marketplace to connect skilled Indian software engineers with US startups looking for affordable remote talent. But with the emergence of demand for human help in training AI models like ChatGPT, the company changed direction.
Now, the company has become an AI-based recruitment platform that connects businesses with experts across the world. It boasts of 30,000 specialists in fields such as law, medicine, finance, and engineering. These people help improve AI systems by labelling data, testing scenarios, and adding human judgment where machines fall short.
Mercor’s clients includes OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and six of the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, and Tesla — use the platform to source the talent needed to turn raw compute into smarter AI.
Much like the founders, the median age of the 30-member team is also 22.
