Indian-American school friends become world’s youngest self-made billionaires
Mercor's founders, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, have become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires at 22.
The 22-year-old founders of Mercor have become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, replacing Mark Zuckerberg who debuted on the list at the age of 23 in 2008. Mercor, an AI recruiting startup, was founded by three high school friends — Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha.
According to a Forbes report, the San Francisco-based startup recently raised $350 million in funding, valuing the company at $10 billion. This has turned CEO Brendan Foody, CTO Adarsh Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha into the world’s youngest self-made billionaires.
The founders of Mercor have joined the ranks of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, putting them among a select group of young tech entrepreneurs whose personal fortunes recently crossed the billion-dollar mark. They follow Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, 27, who became a billionaire just 20 days earlier after a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the NYSE. Before him, Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, 28, held the title for about 18 months. His cofounder Lucy Guo became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire at age 30, taking that spot from Taylor Swift.
Indian-American friends become billionaires
Interestingly, two of the three Mercor co-founders are Indian-Americans. Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath both attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys secondary school in San Jose, California where they were together on the debate team. The two became the first duo in history to win all three national policy debate tournaments in the same year.
Surya Midha is a second-generation immigrant. On his website, he reveals that his parents moved from New Delhi to the United States — “My parents immigrated to the US from New Delhi, India. I was born in Mountain View and raised in San Jose, California,” Midha said.
Indian-origin Hiremath also attended Bellarmine College Preparatory. He went on to study computer science at Harvard University. He spent two years at Harvard before dropping out to focus on Mercor.
“The thing that's crazy for me is, if I weren't working on Mercor, I would have just graduated college a couple months ago,” Hiremath was quoted as saying by Forbes. “My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time.”
At the time Hiremath was at Harvard, Midha was pursuing a bachelor’s in Foreign Studies at Georgetown University. Brendan Foody was also at Georgetown, studying economics.
Both Foody and Midha dropped out of Georgetown around the same time that Hiremath left Harvard to focus on Mercor. All three founders are Thiel Fellows.
“During my sophomore year, I co-founded Mercor in my dorm room. Convinced that labor aggregation was the greatest opportunity of the 21st century, I dropped out of Harvard, moved to San Francisco, and was awarded the Thiel Fellowship,” Hiremath writes on LinkedIn.
