VOI World/ Desk
Indian-origin tech entrepreneur Adarsh Hiremath, 22, has become one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires after his AI startup Mercor touched a valuation of 10 billion dollars. Hiremath and his two cofounders, Brendan Foody and Surya Midha, all aged 22, achieved the milestone barely two years after launching the company in 2023.
Hiremath, a Harvard dropout raised in the United States by parents from Karnataka, said the rapid growth of Mercor felt surreal. Within nine months of its launch, the startup had already hit one million dollars in revenue. The major turning point came in June 2025 when Meta acquired a 49 percent stake in Scale AI for 14 billion dollars, leaving data annotation contracts from Google, OpenAI and others suddenly open. Mercor stepped in quickly to fill that gap.
The company now works with consultants, lawyers, bankers and doctors who help test and refine AI models. Hiremath said Mercor pays an average of 85 dollars per hour to its network of 30,000 expert contractors, significantly higher than industry standards. The platform generates 500 million dollars in annual recurring revenue and disburses nearly 1.5 million dollars each day to its contributors.
Hiremath described the company’s rise as an unexpected trajectory shaped by global shifts in the AI industry. With major labs seeking alternatives after the Scale AI development, Mercor became a preferred choice for high-quality human-in-the-loop work.
From launching Mercor in college to building a billion-dollar AI enterprise, Hiremath and his cofounders have become prominent young figures in the global tech landscape, marking yet another milestone for Indian-origin innovators in the world of artificial intelligence.
