Forbes
Mercor founders (left to right): Adarsh Hiremath, Brendan Foody and Surya Midha.
Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha had no idea what it was like to be recruited to a job, let alone be an employee, dropped out of college to launch Mercor in 2023. But they had engineering skills and an idea: What if an AI tool could assist companies with recruiting and interviewing new hires? Top tech enterprises receive huge volumes of new applications every day, and in the midst of the AI boom, securing the best talent is crucial. Creating a tool that could screen and virtually interview at least the first batch of applicants could save time and money, the trio thought.
It wasn’t long before Mercor was a hit with top players like OpenAI, Google and Meta. But the founders’ biggest hurdle? Not being of legal age to enter bars where executives wanted to meet and talk shop.
Now two years later, the Under 30 alums are officially the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. Following a $350 million Series C raise announced last week, the startup is now valued at $10 billion, giving each of the 22-year-old tech bros a significant net worth boost.
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“It’s definitely crazy,” Foody told Forbes. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.”
When Under 30 editors chatted with Mercor in March of this year, the startup had raised around $135 million from investors like Menlo Park-based Felicis, Benchmark and General Catalyst, which valued it at $2 billion. At the time, the cofounders told Forbes they “never intentionally raised a round” and “haven’t touched almost any of the money.” But when Felicis flies you around in helicopters and takes you on jets to Vegas, the offer is hard to refuse.
Since then, however, Mercor has made somewhat of a pivot. Although the startup was reporting $100 million in revenue with the AI recruiter tool—and argues it’s still the core business—they’ve now ventured into the world of data labelling. Like what Scale AI does (another AI unicorn), Mercor connects skilled contractors with companies to label, evaluate and improve their AI models.
The timing of the pivot was pretty convenient. In June, Meta bought 49% of Scale, Mercor’s now biggest competitor, for some $14 billion, giving players like Mercor a chance to step up while Scale focuses on its relationship with its new parent.
It makes sense that Mercor would want the new capital—and the staggering valuation to get ahead of its competitors. The three cofounders can now boast they’ve toppled Scale’s Alexandr Wang for the title of youngest self-made billionaires, and can even say they joined the nine-digit club earlier than Mark Zuckerberg, who was 23 when he took on the billionaire title.
