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, raised $350 million. The founders, Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha, and Brendan Foody, have each built a company now valued at $10 billion, making them younger than Mark Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire at 23.

Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, both raised in San Jose, California, attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, where they met Foody. The three became close friends and even made history by becoming the first debate duo to win all three major national policy debate tournaments in one year.

After high school, Hiremath studied computer science at Harvard University, where he also worked as a research assistant in macroeconomics. During his second year, he started Mercor from his dorm room, believing that connecting skilled workers with global job opportunities could be one of the biggest business ideas of the 21st century. Later, he dropped out of Harvard and became part of the Thiel Fellowship, a program started by billionaire investor Peter Thiel that gives $100,000 to young entrepreneurs who skip college to build their startups.

About Mercor

Mercor was launched in 2023 with the idea of connecting Indian software engineers and coders with US-based companies looking for freelance tech talent. The platform grew rapidly, attracting huge investments and expanding to multiple markets. In just a few months, the company reached $500 million in annual revenue, according to Forbes.

All three co-founders are now Thiel Fellows, following in the footsteps of other young billionaires who joined the program. The company’s growth has been so fast that it’s already listed on the Forbes Cloud 100, which highlights the top private cloud computing companies worldwide.

Adarsh Hiremath was born in the US to Indian immigrant parents from Karnataka. Surya Midha’s family moved to the US from New Delhi, and he was born in Mountain View, California. Midha later studied Foreign Studies at Georgetown University, where he met Foody, who studied economics.

With their shared background in technology and innovation, the trio turned their college friendship into one of the youngest and most successful AI startups in the world, proving that with vision, hard work, and collaboration, age is no barrier to building a billion-dollar company.