Left Mark Zuckerberg behind
22 year old boys of Indian and American origin have done wonders. The 22-year-old founder of Mercor has become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, replacing Mark Zuckerberg, who joined the list in 2008 at the age of 23. Mercor, an AI recruitment startup, was founded by three high school friends, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, who are also from India.
According to a Forbes report, this San Francisco-based startup has recently raised funding of $350 million, taking the company’s valuation to $10 billion. With this funding, AI company CEO Brendan Foody, CTO Adarsh Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha have become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires.
The Mercor founder has joined the ranks of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, making him one of a select number of young tech entrepreneurs whose personal wealth has recently crossed the billion-dollar mark, second only to 27-year-old Shayne Coplan, CEO of Polymarket, who became a billionaire just 20 days ago after a $2 billion investment from New York Stock Exchange parent company Intercontinental Exchange. Scale AI’s 28-year-old Alexander Wang held the title for about 18 months, his co-founder Lucy Guo became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire at the age of 30, surpassing Taylor Swift,
American and Indian friends became billionaires
Interestingly, two of the three co-founders of Mercor are Indian-Americans. Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath both studied at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, California. At the same time, Surya Midha is a second generation immigrant. On his website, he has told that his parents came to America from New Delhi. Midha told that my parents immigrated to America from New Delhi, India, I was born in Mountain View and was brought up in San Jose, California.
Indian-born Hiremath also attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, then studied computer science at Harvard University and spent two years at Harvard before dropping out to focus on Mercor.
a company built like this
Forbes quoted Hiremath as saying that the strangest thing to me is that if I had not been working at Mercor, I would have graduated from college a few months earlier, my life has changed so much in the short time that Hiremath was at Harvard. Midha was pursuing graduate studies abroad at Georgetown University, Brendan Foody was also studying economics at Georgetown, Foody and Midha both left Georgetown around the same time that Hiremath left Harvard to focus on Mercor, all three founders are Thiel Fellows.