Indian-American school friends become world's youngest self-made billionaires

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 age 23 in 2008. Mercor, an AI recruiting startup, was founded by three high school friends: Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha.

In fact, in a recent funding round, the San Francisco-based startup raised $350 million, valuing the company at $10 billion, according to a recent Forbes report. That turns the company's 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 turn billionaires

Interestingly, two of the three co-founders of Mercor are Indian-Americans. Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys secondary school in San Jose, California where they were on the debate team together. The two then became the first-ever duos in history to win all three national policy debate tournaments in one 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 then studied computer science at Harvard University. He spent two years at Harvard before dropping out to work 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 told Forbes. “My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time.”

When Hiremath was at Harvard, Midha was a student majoring in Foreign Studies at Georgetown University. Brendan Foody was also at Georgetown, where he was 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,” he writes on LinkedIn.