WASHINGTON: Mercor, a recruiting startup that helps Silicon Valley’s biggest AI labs to train their models, has just minted the world’s youngest self-made billionaires: the company’s three 22-year-old founders, a trio of Bay Area high school friends who competed together on their debate team.
Earlier this week, the San Francisco startup announced a $350 million funding round led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from other bigwigs Benchmark, General Catalyst and Robinhood, valuing the company at $10 billion. The new infusion of cash makes CEO Brendan Foody, CTO Adarsh Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha the newest billionaires of the AI boom, each with a roughly 22% stake in the company, Forbes estimates.
“It’s definitely crazy,” Foody told Forbes. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.”
Even in youth-obsessed Silicon Valley, where neophyte founders have been lionized for decades, the startup is particularly well-known for the young age of its leaders. All three founders are Thiel Fellows, members of conservative billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s program to dole out $100,000 grants every year to young people in exchange for foregoing college. They’ve become the poster children of the AI era’s twenty-something entrepreneurs.
“The thing that’s crazy for me is, if I weren’t working on Mercor, I would have just graduated college a couple months ago,” said Hiremath, who spent two years at Harvard before dropping out after Sophomore year. “My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time.”
