Nov 3, 2025 - Three friends — Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha — who started the AI recruitment startup Mercor in the US in 2023, have become the world’s youngest self-made tech billionaires. They are now a part of a select group of young tech entrepreneurs whose personal fortunes recently crossed the billion-dollar mark. The list includes Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, 27, who became a billionaire just 20 days earlier after a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange; Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, 28, who held the title for about 18 months, and his cofounder Lucy Guo who became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire at age 30, taking that spot from Taylor Swift.

What makes India proud is that Adarsh and Surya are of Indian origin.

At just 22 years of age, they have broken the record previously held by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who became a self-made billionaire at 23 in 2008. The trio are Thiel Fellows — a programme created by billionaire Peter Thiel that grants $100,000 to college dropouts working on innovative ideas. They left college to focus on their startup and believed in their vision.

The San Francisco-based Mercor began with the idea of connecting Indian engineers to American companies. With AI avatars for interviews and innovative data-labelling tools, Mercor quickly built its reputation. Only two years after launch, it has become a major AI recruitment force, providing training data and talent to some of the world’s leading AI labs. Today, it works with top companies like OpenAI and has become the backbone of AI talent infrastructure.

Hiremath and Midha first met at age 10 at an elementary school debate competition. They later became stars of the debate team at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, California, where they also met Foody. Midha’s parents moved from New Delhi to the US, while Hiremath dropped out of Harvard University months before graduation to focus on the startup.

According to a Forbes report, Mercor is now valued at around $10 billion (Rs 88,000 crore), with a recent funding round raising $350 million.

With Media Inputs

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