TOI correspondent from Washington: In a shocking testomony to the growth in Synthetic Intelligence (AI), three 22-year-old highschool associates from Silicon Valley, together with two Indian-People, have turn out to be the world’s youngest self-made billionaires.Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, co-founders of the San Francisco-based AI recruiting platform Mercor, achieved the staggering feat after their firm not too long ago secured $350 million in funding, valuing the agency at $10 billion. This milestone dethrones Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who grew to become a billionaire at 23.The $10 billion valuation provides every of the three founders, who maintain roughly 22 % stakes, a internet value exceeding $2 billion. Foody is the CEO of the corporate; Hiremath, whose dad and mom emigrated from Karnataka, is the CTO; and Midha, whose dad and mom emigrated from New Delhi, is the board chairman. The trio’s journey started at Bellarmine Faculty Preparatory, an all-boys Jesuit faculty in San Jose, the place they bonded over late-night preparations for nationwide debate tournaments. The talents they honed—rapid-fire evaluation and persuasive logic—would later turn out to be the bedrock of their entrepreneurial success.“We have been at all times arguing about the way forward for work,” Foody recalled in a latest Forbes interview.After highschool, the buddies scattered to elite universities: Foody to Georgetown for economics, Hiremath to Harvard for laptop science, and Midha to Georgetown for overseas service, earlier than they have been reunited by the start-up siren name of Silicon Valley.In early 2023, throughout their sophomore years, they launched Mercor even whereas they have been aside. The preliminary thought was easy: a web based freelance market to bridge the expertise hole by connecting expert software program engineers in India — the place coders are plentiful — with cash-strapped U.S. startups hungry for distant assist. Nonetheless, it shortly pivoted, fueled by the explosive demand for “human-in-the-loop” providers wanted to refine foundational AI fashions like ChatGPT.Evolding into an AI-powered platform that automates recruitment whereas delivering a worldwide community of vetted contractors, Mercor now boasts over 30,000 specialists worldwide — in fields starting from regulation and medication to finance and engineering — who’re paid to label information, simulate situations, and inject the nuanced human judgment algorithms can not replicate. Purchasers, together with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and 6 of the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants, use the platform to supply the expertise wanted to show uncooked compute into smarter AI. The lean operation is run by a 30-person group whose median age is simply 22. Hiremath’s 2035 imaginative and prescient for Mercor is to have constructed a unified international labor market, matching each particular person to each job or job in a seamless method.The corporate’s progress has been dizzying. By mid-2024, Mercor hit a $500 million in annualized income, up from $100 million simply months earlier. The founders, all recipients of the Thiel Fellowship’s $100,000 grant for skipping school, accelerated their funding rounds at a breakneck tempo. A $32 million Sequence A in September 2024 valued them at $250 million, and a $100 million Sequence B in February 2025 despatched the valuation hovering to $2 billion, main VC-watchers to name it the quickest rising start-up in Silicon Valley. The ultimate turbocharge got here this summer time: a $14.3 billion acquisition of Mercor’s fundamental rival, Scale AI, by Meta paved the best way for even quicker progress for the upstart start-up. Cautious of conflicts, main AI labs like OpenAI and DeepMind turned en masse to Mercor for a impartial various. One other $350 million Sequence C infusion this week bumped them into the billionaire’s membership, primarily based on Mercor’s valuation.