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Three 22-year-old friends, including two Indian-Americans, have become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires after their artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Mercor, secured $350 million in funding. The milestone has placed them ahead of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who first entered the Forbes Billionaires List at the age of 23 in 2008. The new billionaires, Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha, and Brendan Foody, each own roughly 22 per cent of Mercor, which is now valued at around $10 billion. Their journey from school friends to tech tycoons has attracted global attention, as they have now broken every previous record for wealth creation at such a young age. Hiremath and Midha, both of Indian origin, were raised in California’s San Jose area and studied at Bellarmine College Preparatory, a private all-boys school. The duo became well-known in school debate circles after winning all three major national policy debate championships in the same year, a first in American history. Hiremath later joined Harvard University to study computer science and also worked as a research assistant in macroeconomics under former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. However, during his second year, he co-founded Mercor from his dorm room, believing that labour aggregation would be “the greatest opportunity of the 21st century.” He soon dropped out of Harvard to focus full-time on the startup and was awarded the Thiel Fellowship, a programme founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel that grants $100,000 to young entrepreneurs who choose to leave college to pursue their business ideas. Speaking to Forbes, Hiremath reflected on his journey, saying, “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.” Midha, whose parents immigrated from New Delhi, was born in Mountain View and later earned a degree in foreign studies from Georgetown University, where he met Foody, Mercor’s third co-founder. All three founders come from families with deep roots in technology, each of their parents worked in Silicon Valley’s software and engineering sectors.
