In the AI era, new billionaires are emerging at increasingly younger ages. AI businesses are sprouting like mushrooms; some fail, but many succeed. One such success is "Mercor" an AI recruitment startup providing AI tools for hiring, performing the same functions as HR departments used by many big tech companies in Silicon Valley.
Besides rapid growth, Mercor, founded in 2023, generated over 1 million US dollars in revenue within just 2 years and raised massive funding, propelling its three founders to become the world's youngest self-made billionaires at only 22 years old.
Another reason Mercor draws the spotlight is its incorporation of human expertise as a key foundation behind its AI system. Simply put, Mercor is creating a new labor market where "humans" play a role in training AI that might one day replace us.
The origin of Mercor stems from the ideas of these three individuals: Brendan Foody (CEO) , Adarsh Hiremath (Co-CEO) and Surya Midha (COO) all members of the Thiel Fellowship who decided to drop out shortly before their final exams to fully commit to this startup.
This article from Thairath Money'sHow to Make Moneycolumn dives deep into the story of these three close friends, who became new young billionaires in 2025 by building a fast-growing AI startup that, despite fierce competition, has grown into a business valued at over 10 billion US dollars.
Before coming together to start the company, each of the three had different backgrounds: Brendan Foody and Surya Midha studied at Georgetown University, while Adarsh Hiremath attended Harvard University.
All three shared a common decision: during their sophomore year, they chose to drop out to pursue a path focused on tech startups. "I knew I wanted to drop out before the sophomore finals... so I simply didn’t take the exams that year," Brendan Foody told Fortune.
Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath, two Indian-American friends from high school, later met Brendan Foody. During a hackathon in São Paulo, the three conceived an idea addressing both organizations and job seekers in the AI era. They noticed a market gap: companies struggled to find skilled engineers, while talented engineers abroad had difficulty accessing major firms.
Mercor was born with a simple yet powerful model: to act as a bridge connecting companies with skilled engineers overseas. The platform manages everything from screening and interviewing to hiring, generating revenue through fees. Their initial model clearly showed that "the labor market isn’t short of talent, but lacks an efficient matching system."
What sets Mercor apart from typical recruitment platforms is its founders’ forward-looking view. They see the world entering an era where AI increasingly impacts professional jobs. The key question isn’t just "What can AI do?" but "Who decides if AI’s performance is good and reliable?"
In January 2023, Mercor officially launched, pivoting from a general labor matching platform to becoming the infrastructure for the future of work. It incorporated a human-in-the-loop approach, inviting experts—from engineers and lawyers to doctors and financiers—to evaluate, test, and create data to train AI models.
The founders believe that as AI is applied more widely—from drafting legal documents to analyzing medical data—specialists must verify accuracy and establish strict quality standards, tasks AI cannot create independently.
In 2024, the three were selected for the Thiel Fellowship, receiving 100,000 US dollars in funding to further develop the startup. They currently hold these roles in the company they co-founded:
Mercor uses AI to enhance hiring efficiency. Its platform screens resumes, matches candidates, and conducts AI interviews lasting about 20 minutes to assess skills and create profiles. It then pairs candidates with suitable full-time, part-time, or hourly jobs. The platform can even automate payroll; employers upload job details, and Mercor's system recommends the best candidates.
During its seed funding round in 2023, just 9 months after founding, Mercor raised over 3.6 million US dollars, fueled by surpassing 1 million US dollars in revenue within under a year.
The company continued raising funds: Series A attracted top investors like Peter Thiel and Jack Dorsey, boosting valuation to 250 million US dollars. Series B funding between late 2024 and early 2025 lifted valuation beyond 2 billion US dollars. Most recently, in October 2025, Series C raised an additional 350 million US dollars, pushing Mercor’s valuation to 10 billion US dollars.
Mercor’s users include major tech firms like Meta and Amazon, as well as leading AI players such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
This momentum led to explosive revenue growth. Mercor earns fees based on client billable hours. As of September, the startup was growing 50% monthly, with an annual revenue run rate in the tens of millions of US dollars.
Rising valuations have made the three founders billionaires at just 22 years old, topping the list of the world’s youngest billionaires with individual net worths exceeding 2.2 billion US dollars each.
However, Mercor faces questions about whether its technology will increasingly replace humans in the AI era. The founders offer a different perspective, stating that "Rather than taking jobs away, Mercor helps automate many economic tasks, raising the value of human labor in roles still requiring a human touch."
From their viewpoint, Mercor serves to identify "which jobs humans should perform in an AI-driven economy and which tasks AI cannot yet handle."
Sources:Fortune,TechCrunch,Forbes,Founded,CNBC
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