Indian-origin school friends become world’s youngest self-made billionaires with AI startup at 22 | Trending News
The 22-year-old founders of Mercor, a fast-growing AI recruiting startup, have officially become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, surpassing Mark Zuckerberg, who first appeared on Forbes’ billionaire list at 23 in 2008.
According to Forbes, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, three high school friends who launched Mercor in San Francisco, US, recently secured $350 million in new funding, valuing their company at $10 billion. The massive valuation helped the trio—Foody as CEO, Hiremath as CTO, and Midha as board chairman—step into billionaire status.
Two of Mercor’s co-founders, Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath, are Indian Americans who first met at Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys school in San Jose, California. Both were standout members of the school’s debate team, becoming the first duo ever to win all three national policy debate tournaments in a single year, Forbes reported.
Midha, a second-generation immigrant, writes on his personal website, “My parents immigrated to the US from New Delhi, India. I was born in Mountain View and raised in San Jose, California.”
Hiremath, also of Indian origin, went on to study computer science at Harvard University, where he spent two years before dropping out to focus on Mercor full-time. Reflecting on his journey, he told Forbes, “The thing that’s crazy for me is, if I weren’t working on Mercor, I would have just graduated college a couple of months ago. My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time.”
While Hiremath was at Harvard, Midha pursued a bachelor’s in foreign studies at Georgetown University, where Brendan Foody was also enrolled, studying economics. Both Midha and Foody decided to leave Georgetown around the same time Hiremath left Harvard to dedicate themselves fully to building Mercor.
All three are Thiel Fellows, having received backing from the fellowship founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, which supports young entrepreneurs who leave college to build startups, the report stated.
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Just weeks earlier, Shayne Coplan, 27, the founder of Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market platform, joined the list following a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. Before that, Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, 28, held the title for 18 months, while his cofounder Lucy Guo became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire at 30, overtaking Taylor Swift.
