Indian-American friends become world’s youngest self-made billionaires with start-up dedicated to helping freelance coders

Three 22-year-old friends, including two Indian-Americans have become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires after their AI recruitment startup, Mercor, secured $350 million in funding. As per reports, the trio of friends has overtaken Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who first appeared on a popular magazine's billionaire list at age 23 in 2008, and they have set a new record.

3 AI founders, including 2 Indian-Americans, become world's youngest self-made billionaires

Indian-American founders Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, along with their co-founder Brendan Foody transformed Mercor into a $10-billion powerhouse, each holding about 22% equity in the company. Raised in the San Jose, California area, Hiremath and Midha both attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys high school, where they joined the policy debate team and became the first duo to win all three major national policy debate tournaments in a single year.

Hiremath later pursued computer science at Harvard University, where he also worked as a research assistant in macroeconomics. During his sophomore year, he co-founded Mercor in his dorm room. He eventually dropped out, moved to San Francisco, and became a Thiel Fellow, part of billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s program that awards $100,000 grants to young entrepreneurs who leave college to build startups.

“The thing that's crazy for me is, if I weren't working on Mercor, I would have just graduated from college a couple of months ago,” Hiremath said in an interview.

Mercor, launched in 2023, connects Indian engineers with U.S. companies looking for freelance coders. Its rapid growth has made all three founders billionaires and notably, all are Thiel Fellows

Just weeks before their rise, 27-year-old Shayne Coplan, founder of Polymarket, entered the billionaire ranks following a $2-billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. Before that, 28-year-old Alexandr Wang of Scale AI held the youngest billionaire title, while his co-founder Lucy Guo became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire at 30, surpassing Taylor Swift.

At 22, the Mercor founders are younger than Zuckerberg was when he first reached billionaire status at 23. Midha, born in June, is the youngest of the three by about two months.

In September, soon after Mercor appeared on the Cloud 100 list of top private cloud companies, Foody announced that the company’s annualized revenue run rate had surged to $500 million, up from $100 million in March, as per reports.

Hiremath was born in the U.S. to Indian immigrant parents and grew up in the Bay Area. His LinkedIn notes that while at Harvard, he studied computer science, conducted machine learning research, and worked under Larry Summers as a research assistant. He left Harvard after two years.

Midha, whose parents emigrated from New Delhi, was born in Mountain View and raised in San Jose. His website states he graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in Foreign Studies, attending at the same time as Hiremath’s Harvard years. Foody also attended Georgetown, majoring in economics.

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