Three friends, all aged 22, including two of Indian descent, have achieved the status of the youngest self-made billionaires globally after their artificial intelligence recruiting company, Mercor, secured $350 million in funding. This remarkable feat has allowed them to eclipse Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who first appeared on Forbes’ billionaire list at the age of 23 in 2008. The two Indian-Americans are Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha.
Hiremath and Midha, alongside their colleague Brendan Foody, transformed Mercor into a $10 billion powerhouse, with each of them owning about 22% of the company’s shares, setting a new benchmark for youthful wealth creation.
Both Hiremath and Midha grew up in the San Jose area of California and were students at Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys high school. It was there that they participated in the policy debate team and made history as the first pair to win all three major national policy debate championships in a single year.
Hiremath later enrolled at Harvard University to pursue a degree in computer science, during which he served as a research assistant in macroeconomics. In his sophomore year, he co-founded Mercor from his dorm room, believing that labor aggregation would represent “the greatest opportunity of the 21st century.”
He subsequently left Harvard, relocated to San Francisco, and was awarded the Thiel Fellowship.
“What’s unbelievable for me is that, had I not been working on Mercor, I would have graduated from college just a few months ago,” Hiremath stated, as quoted by Forbes.
All three founders are recipients of the Thiel Fellowship, a program established by billionaire investor Peter Thiel to provide $100,000 grants annually to young individuals who choose to skip college, according to Forbes.
MERCOR WAS ESTABLISHED TO LINK INDIAN TECH TALENT WITH US FIRMS
Founded in 2023, Mercor aims to connect Indian engineers with US companies in need of freelance coding services.
Just weeks before, Shayne Coplan, 27, the founder of the cryptocurrency prediction platform Polymarket, joined the billionaire ranks following a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange, which manages the New York Stock Exchange.
Prior to this, Alexandr Wang, 28, founder of Scale AI, held the title for 18 months, while his co-founder Lucy Guo became the youngest self-made female billionaire at age 30, surpassing Taylor Swift.
What is particularly remarkable is their age: at just 22, they are younger than Mark Zuckerberg was when he first became a billionaire at 23.
Midha, whose birthday falls in June, is the youngest of the co-founders by a margin of approximately two months.
In September, shortly after Mercor was included in the Forbes Cloud 100 list of leading private cloud computing firms, Foody revealed that the company had achieved an annualized revenue run rate of $500 million, up from $100 million in March, as reported by Forbes.
WHO IS BILLIONAIRE ADARSH HIREMATH OF MERCOR?
Adarsh Hiremath was born in the United States to immigrant parents who came from India. He spent his childhood in the Bay Area and attended Bellarmine College Preparatory for his secondary education.
As per his LinkedIn profile, at Harvard, he engaged in computer science courses, conducted machine learning research, and assisted in macroeconomic studies under Larry Summers. He departed from Harvard after two years.
WHO IS SURYA MIDHA OF MERCOR, THE YOUNGEST BILLIONAIRE?
Surya Midha’s parents emigrated from New Delhi to the US. He was born in Mountain View and raised in San Jose, California, according to his personal website.
He also earned a degree in Foreign Studies from Georgetown University, concurrently while Hiremath attended Harvard. Brendan Foody was also at Georgetown, focusing on economics.
The parents of the trio were all software engineers; Foody’s mother was part of Meta’s real estate team, and his father established a graphics interface company in the 1990s before turning to startup consulting, as noted by Forbes.