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2 Indian-American billionaires double fortunes as AI startup Mercor hits $20 billion valuation
Mercor CEO Brendan Foody, CTO Adarsh Hiremath and chairman Surya Midha are now worth an estimated $4.2 billion each.
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The three 23-year-old co-founders of AI startup Mercor have doubled their fortunes after the company raised $750 million in a fresh funding round, taking its valuation to $20 billion, Forbes reported. The funding round, announced on Tuesday, included investors such as Benchmark, General Catalyst, Nvidia and Salesforce.
According to Forbes, Mercor CEO Brendan Foody, CTO Adarsh Hiremath and chairman Surya Midha are now worth an estimated $4.2 billion each, based on their respective 21% stakes in the company. Their fortunes have risen from around $2.2 billion in October 2025, when the startup was valued at $10 billion.
Notably, two of the three co-founders, Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath, are Indian-Americans. The trio became the world’s youngest self-made billionaires at the age of 22 last year, surpassing Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, who was 27 at the time, and Mark Zuckerberg, who first became a billionaire at 23. They continue to hold the title, with Midha being the youngest among the three by approximately two months.
Who are the two Indian-American co-founders?
Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath both attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys secondary school in San Jose, California where they were together on the debate team. The two became the first duo in history to win all three national policy debate tournaments in the same year.
Surya Midha is a second-generation immigrant whose parents moved to the US from New Delhi. On his website, he shared that he was born in Mountain View and raised in San Jose, California.
Hiremath also attended Bellarmine College Preparatory. He later studied computer science at Harvard University, where he spent two years before dropping out to focus on Mercor.
The two met Foody during their high school debate days at Bellarmine College Preparatory.
(Also Read: Indian-American school friends become world’s youngest self-made billionaires)
About Mercor
Founded in 2023, Mercor initially started as a recruiting platform connecting freelance coders in India with companies in the US. According to Forbes, the business later expanded into data labelling, connecting experts such as doctors and lawyers with leading AI companies, including OpenAI, to help train advanced AI models.
The company said in a press release that its fresh funding will be used to build out Mercor’s new evaluation and post-training business, which helps companies improve AI models by providing ways to measure how well they complete tasks.
