Champion Debaters To Technopreneurs: Two Indian-Americans Replace Zuckerberg As Youngest Self-Made Billionaires

Benefitting from the higher global adoption rate of AI, two Indian-Americans have created history by becoming the youngest self-made billionaires at 22, a title held earlier by Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, who joined Forbes’ billionaire list at age 23 in 2008.

As per Forbes, Mercor's latest round of $350 milion funding valuated the company at $10 billion, which made its CEO Brendan Foody, CTO Adarsh Hiremath, and board chairman Surya Midha the world's youngest self-made billionaires.

Mercors is involed in creating AI-powered recruitment and data-labeling systems, enabling human intellegence to train models for major AI labs.

"It's definitely crazy. It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago," Foody said, citing Forbes report.  

Also Read:  Pine Labs IPO: Check Price Band, GMP & Key Details

Indian-Origin School Buddies Turn Youngest Self-Made Billionaires

Among the three founding members of Mercor, Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath, are Indian Americans who first met at Bellarmine College Preparatory, in San Jose, California.

Midha and Hiremath, both debaters from school became the first duo to win all three major national policy debate championships in a year.

Midha, Hiremath and Foody became debate members

standout members of the school’s debate team and became the first duo to win all three major national policy debate tournaments in a single year, Forbes reported.

Hiremath, who is of Indian origin, later attended Harvard University to study computer science but dropped out after two years to focus fully on Mercor.

Speaking about his phenomenal career surge, he said, "“The thing that’s crazy for me is, if I weren’t working on Mercor, I would have just graduated college a couple of months ago. My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time,” citing a Forbes report.

What the three Mercor founder share inn common is they were all Thiel Fellows, supported by billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s fellowship, which funds young entrepreneurs who choose to leave college to build startups.

Their achievement comes just weeks after Shayne Coplan, 27, founder of Polymarket, joined the Forbes billionaire list following a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.