AI AI Yo! Two desi lads in Silicon Valley become youngest self-made billionaires at 22

From left, Adarsh Hiremath, Brendan Foody, and Surya Midha (Image credit: NYT News Service)

TOI correspondent from Washington: In a stunning testament to the boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI), three 22-year-old high school friends from Silicon Valley, including two Indian-Americans, have become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires.Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, co-founders of the San Francisco-based AI recruiting platform Mercor, achieved the staggering feat after their company recently secured $350 million in funding, valuing the firm at $10 billion. This milestone dethrones Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire at 23.The $10 billion valuation gives each of the three founders, who hold roughly 22 percent stakes, a net worth exceeding $2 billion. Foody is the CEO of the company; Hiremath, whose parents emigrated from Karnataka, is the CTO; and Midha, whose parents emigrated from New Delhi, is the board chairman. The trio’s journey began at Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys Jesuit school in San Jose, where they bonded over late-night preparations for national debate tournaments. The skills they honed—rapid-fire analysis and persuasive logic—would later become the bedrock of their entrepreneurial success.“We were always arguing about the future of work,” Foody recalled in a recent Forbes interview.After high school, the friends scattered to elite universities: Foody to Georgetown for economics, Hiremath to Harvard for computer science, and Midha to Georgetown for foreign service, before they were reunited by the start-up siren call of Silicon Valley.In early 2023, during their sophomore years, they launched Mercor even while they were apart. The initial idea was simple: an online freelance marketplace to bridge the talent gap by connecting skilled software engineers in India — where coders are plentiful — with cash-strapped U.S. startups hungry for remote help. However, it quickly pivoted, fueled by the explosive demand for “human-in-the-loop” services needed to refine foundational AI models like ChatGPT.Evolding into an AI-powered platform that automates recruitment while delivering a global network of vetted contractors, Mercor now boasts over 30,000 specialists worldwide — in fields ranging from law and medicine to finance and engineering — who are paid to label data, simulate scenarios, and inject the nuanced human judgment algorithms cannot replicate. Clients, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and six of the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants, use the platform to source the talent needed to turn raw compute into smarter AI. The lean operation is run by a 30-person team whose median age is just 22. Hiremath’s 2035 vision for Mercor is to have built a unified global labor marketplace, matching every person to every job or task in a seamless way.The company’s growth has been dizzying. By mid-2024, Mercor hit a $500 million in annualized revenue, up from $100 million just months earlier. The founders, all recipients of the Thiel Fellowship’s $100,000 grant for skipping college, accelerated their funding rounds at a breakneck pace. A $32 million Series A in September 2024 valued them at $250 million, and a $100 million Series B in February 2025 sent the valuation soaring to $2 billion, leading VC-watchers to call it the fastest growing start-up in Silicon Valley. The final turbocharge came this summer: a $14.3 billion acquisition of Mercor’s main rival, Scale AI, by Meta paved the way for even faster growth for the upstart start-up. Wary of conflicts, major AI labs like OpenAI and DeepMind turned en masse to Mercor for a neutral alternative. Another $350 million Series C infusion this week bumped them into the billionaire’s club, based on Mercor’s valuation.