The Artificial Intelligence revolution has minted new legends, but none quite so young as the founders of the AI recruiting company, Mercor. With a fresh valuation of $10 billion, the startup’s three co-founders have secured their places as the youngest self-made technology billionaires in history, all at the age of 22. This feat notably places them ahead of Mark Zuckerberg, who reached the milestone at 23 nearly two decades ago.

Funding Confirms $10 Billion Valuation

The San Francisco-based recruiting startup, which specializes in connecting expert data annotators to Silicon Valley’s largest AI labs, announced a major funding round of $350 million. The round was led by Felicis Ventures, with significant participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures, cementing the company’s massive $10 billion valuation.

This influx of capital immediately propelled the three childhood friends—CEO Brendan Foudy, CTO Adarsh Hiremath, and Chairman Surya Midha—into the exclusive club of AI-era billionaires. According to Forbes' estimates, each founder retains approximately a 22% stake in the newly valued company.

"This is definitely insane," Foudy shared with Forbes, describing the feeling as surreal. "This is obviously far beyond our wildest dreams. We couldn’t have imagined an outcome like this just two years ago."

Setting a New Record for Young Wealth

Even in a tech landscape that has long glorified youthful entrepreneurship, Mercor stands out for the remarkable youth of its leadership team. The three founders, who met and bonded over high school debate competitions in San Francisco, are all recipients of the prestigious Thiel Fellowship, a $100,000 grant from conservative billionaire investor Peter Thiel that encourages young people to skip or drop out of college to start a business.

Hiremath, who spent two years at Harvard before departing after his sophomore year, reflected on the rapid change: "What’s crazy to me is that if I wasn’t working on Mercor, I would have graduated college a few months ago. My life has completely flipped in such a short amount of time."

The co-founders now sit atop the list of young tech entrepreneurs to reach billionaire status through their own efforts. They dethrone Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, who held the title for a brief 20 days at age 27. Before Coplan, Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang (28) maintained the position for about 18 months.

At 22, Foudy, Hiremath, and Midha are all younger than Zuckerberg was when he first achieved a billion-dollar fortune. Midha, whose birthday is in June, is the youngest of the trio by about two months. The only other self-made business person to debut earlier was Kylie Jenner at 21, though Forbes later revised her wealth following an investigation into exaggerated company revenues.

The Pivot to Data Annotation

Foudy, Hiremath, and Midha launched Mercor in 2023. They initially set out to build a platform that connected engineers in India with U.S. companies looking for freelance developers. They created a hiring platform where candidates would be interviewed by AI avatars and matched with prospective employers.

Through this early work, they discovered the high demand within the data labeling sector. They successfully pivoted the platform to connect highly specialized associates, such as Ph.D.s and lawyers, to top-tier AI laboratories like OpenAI for crucial data annotation tasks.

Their success has been explosive. After debuting on the Forbes Cloud 100 list of top private cloud companies, Foudy announced in September that Mercor had reached an estimated $500 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)—a massive jump from $100 million recorded just in March of the same year. All three founders were named to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Competitive Landscape and Legal Challenges

Mercor’s latest funding news arrives amid a highly competitive and shifting data annotation industry. The market underwent a significant disruption in June when Meta announced its acquisition of a 49% stake in industry giant Scale AI for $14 billion, simultaneously securing the services of its renowned CEO, Alexandr Wang. This move spurred smaller competitors, including Mercor, to become more aggressive, anticipating that major research labs might seek providers less closely tied to Meta’s own AI ambitions.

While rivals like Surge are reportedly in talks to raise funding at a $30 billion valuation (potentially making its founder, Edwin Chen, the youngest Forbes 400 billionaire), and Turing AI continues to grow, the competitive heat has also resulted in friction.

In September, Scale AI filed a lawsuit against Mercor, alleging the startup stole trade secrets. The complaint targets a former Scale executive who joined Mercor, claiming he shared over 100 confidential documents with his new employer.

When asked about the litigation, Foudy remained unfazed: "That’s not something we think much about."

Dedicated to the Work

As natives of the Bay Area, Foudy and his partners grew up steeped in the world of technology, all being children of software engineers. Foudy’s mother worked in Meta’s real estate division, and his father founded a graphics interface company in the 90s before transitioning to startup consulting. Hiremath and Midha, who have been friends since age 10, met Foudy through high school debate.

Hiremath’s interest in the labor market was ignited while he conducted research at Harvard for Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary and now a board member at OpenAI. Summers later became an investor in Mercor.

Despite their new billionaire status, the founders claim they haven’t had time for extravagant purchases. "I leave the office around 10:30 at night, on average, six days a week," Foudy noted. "So, there’s not much time outside of that to surround myself with non-work-related things."