The Gen Z billionaires powering the next wave of AI

November 4, 2025

At just 22, three American college dropouts — Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha — have joined the ranks of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. Their San Francisco-based startup, Mercor, has become one of the most talkedabout names in artificial intelligence, valued at $10 billion after a $350 million funding round. The feat puts them ahead of Mark Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire at 23, and cements their place in the frontlines of the AI revolution.

 A Startup Born in a Dorm Room Era

Mercor began in 2023 as a modest attempt to use AI in recruiting. The founders — high school friends from California’s Bay Area — initially wanted to automate resume screening and help companies hire faster. Their goal was simple: match skilled engineers in India with American firms seeking freelance talent. What started as a niche human resources platform soon found itself in the middle of a global AI arms race. The platform’s growing network of skilled contractors caught the attention of major AI labs.

These companies, racing to build better chatbots, needed human evaluators to fine-tune responses and assess model quality. Mercor adapted quickly, shifting from recruitment to data labeling — the unseen backbone of AI development. Soon, its workforce expanded to include not just coders but also professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and journalists who could evaluate specialized chatbot outputs. As demand surged, the company attracted investors and industry leaders.

In May, Mercor hired Sundeep Jain, former chief product officer at Uber, as its first president — a move that signaled its ambition to scale globally.

The Three Who Built It

Foody, Hiremath, and Midha share similar upbringings — all are children of software engineers, raised amid Silicon Valley’s tech culture. They bonded over school debate tournaments before dropping out of college to chase a shared vision. Foody, Mercor’s CEO, grew up surrounded by entrepreneurship. His mother worked for Meta’s real estate division, while his father founded a graphics company in the 1990s before turning startup adviser. Foody launched his first business at 16, helping friends get promotions on Amazon Web Services for $500 each. Hiremath, the company’s CTO, studied at Harvard before leaving midway to pursue Mercor.

His academic curiosity about labor markets led him to work under economist and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who later became one of Mercor’s early investors. Midha, the board chairman, had known Hiremath since childhood, the two having met at a local debate competition when they were ten.

All three are recipients of the Thiel Fellowship — a program founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel that funds young entrepreneurs who leave college to build companies. “If I weren’t working on Mercor, I would have just graduated college a couple of months ago,” Hiremath told Forbes. “My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time.”

Riding the AI Boom

Mercor’s rise coincided with turbulence in the data-labeling industry, a vital yet often overlooked segment of AI development. In June, Meta bought a 49 percent stake in Scale AI — one of the sector’s biggest players — for $14 billion and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to oversee its AI division. The move alarmed Scale’s clients, who worried about conflicts of interest and data privacy. That vacuum benefited Mercor. With companies looking for independent partners, its business quadrupled almost overnight. But success brought scrutiny. In September, Scale sued Mercor, accusing it of stealing trade secrets and claiming a former employee transferred over a hundred confidential documents. Foody brushed off the allegations, telling Forbes, “It’s not something we spend a lot of time thinking about.”

The Billion-Dollar Moment

Mercor’s recent funding round, led by Felicis Ventures and joined by Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures, pushed the company’s valuation to $10 billion. The three founders, each holding roughly 22 percent of the firm, are now billionaires in their own right. Their client list includes some of the world’s most powerful AI players, such as OpenAI and Anthropic. For the founders, the sudden success feels surreal.

“It’s definitely crazy,” Foody said. “It feels beyond our wildest imaginations — anything we could have anticipated two years ago.” Mercor’s story is a reflection of a new generation’s rise — one defined not by degrees or credentials but by speed, risk, and timing. In just two years, three teenagers turned college dropouts have built a company that sits at the center of one of the world’s most transformative technologies. Whether Mercor can sustain its meteoric ascent remains to be seen, but for now, its founders have redefined what it means to make it big in the age of AI