Adarsh Hiremath

Like his two fellow co-founders of Mercor, he is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area and the child of a software engineer.⁠[1]

Global Indian described him in December 2024 as being of Indian origin.⁠[2]

A profile that FelicisFelicisFelicis (whose funds and earlier brand use the name Felicis Ventures) is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, founded in 2006 by former Google product manager Aydin Senkut; it has invested in companies including Shopify, Canva and Adyen.Open the full entry published in July 2026 writes that he was pushed into debate in middle school because his parents worried he was too quiet. Forbes writes that he and Surya MidhaSurya MidhaSurya Midha is an American entrepreneur and a co-founder of the AI company Mercor, where he was chief operating officer before becoming chairman of the board in October 2025; in high school he and Adarsh Hiremath won national championships in policy debate, and he was named a Thiel Fellow in 2024. In March 2026 Forbes described him as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.Open the full entry became childhood friends at the age of 10 through elementary-school debate tournaments.⁠[3][1]

He attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys school in San Jose. The Felicis profile writes that he and Brendan Foody met in a rhetoric class in their freshman year; Forbes writes that he and Surya Midha met Foody through high-school debate. The three were on the school’s speech and debate team; the principal, Rod Jemison, said that they had captained the team and were among the best debaters in the school’s history (“Brendan, Adarsh, and Surya were some of Bellarmine’s top debaters in its history”), and that the team had been ranked top in the country for four years in a row. He added that since leaving, the three had volunteered at their old school as debate coaches.⁠[3][1][4][2]

The Felicis profile writes that he and Surya Midha “formed a historically formidable duo” and became “the first team to ever win all three national tournaments in policy debate.”⁠[3]

The Felicis profile writes that during the Covid pandemic Brendan Foody started a company that built software interfaces to help startups interact better with AWSAmazon Web ServicesAmazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud computing business of Amazon. Launched in July 2002, it made its public debut with the Amazon S3 storage service on March 14, 2006, and has since added hundreds of services, including Amazon EC2; its segment net sales were about $46.0 billion in the third quarter of 2026.Open the full entry servers, and that Hiremath joined in. Hiremath recalled: “I got drawn to startups in part because Brendan roped me in.”⁠[3]

After graduating from Bellarmine College Preparatory in 2021, he enrolled at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, while Brendan Foody and Surya Midha went to Georgetown University. The Harvard Crimson lists him as a member of the Class of 2025; Global Indian writes that he was enrolled in a combined bachelor’s and master’s program in computer science.⁠[4][5][2]

Forbes wrote in October 2025 that he became interested in labor markets when he attended Harvard and did research for Larry Summers, whom the article describes as a former U.S. Treasury Secretary and a current member of the OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry board, and who later invested in Mercor.⁠[1]

In January 2023 he co-founded Mercor with Brendan Foody and Surya Midha. Brendan Foody explained in March 2025 that the idea began in the founders’ dorm rooms, when the three were only 19. Forbes writes that the company started out matching engineers in India with U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry companies that needed freelance coders.⁠[5][6][1]

Fortune writes that Brendan Foody knew that he, Hiremath and Surya Midha had built something that could not be replicated in classrooms; the model for the company took shape at a hackathon in São Paulo, and within nine months he and his co-founders had turned the idea into a company with a $1 million revenue run rate. The Felicis profile writes that the founders developed the idea at a three-week hackathon in São Paulo, Brazil, and that they automated the processes for reviewing résumés, conducting interviews and making hiring decisions.⁠[7][3]

He said in 2025 that the idea for Mercor came out of a software development business in which finding people was hard: “we’d build it with a team that we recruited,” and “the magic was actually in the really, really exceptional people that we’re finding.” He also said that “I wouldn’t say there was some specific logical thing that gave me the confidence to pursue Mercor,” describing instead an “emotional pull.”⁠[8]

In 2023 General CatalystGeneral CatalystGeneral Catalyst (GC) is an investment firm founded in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, United States, created by Joel Cutler, David Fialkow and Bill Fitzgerald, that backs companies from the seed stage through growth.Open the full entry led Mercor’s $3.6 million seed round.⁠[9]

He said that his sophomore spring semester in 2023 “was definitely the busiest semester of my life,” comparing the startup to a club that demanded 60 to 70 hours a week.⁠[5]

He spent two years at Harvard and left after completing his sophomore year to work on Mercor full time; the Felicis profile writes that he weighed the situation more carefully and opted to take a leave of absence from Harvard. In 2023 the three founders left their universities, moved back to the Bay Area and set up the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.⁠[1][5][3][4]

The Felicis profile writes that in August 2023, while still college sophomores, he and his two co-founders sat down at TeslaTeslaTesla is an American electric vehicle and energy company whose businesses span automobiles, solar energy, and battery energy storage. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, its shares are listed on Nasdaq under the ticker TSLA.Open the full entry’s offices in the San Francisco Bay Area with the entire co-founding team of xAI except Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry, a meeting that a Mercor customer had set up over Zoom two days earlier. It further writes that he and Brendan Foody then spent months building a new version of the product, initially striking a deal with the data-labeling company Scale AI and later deciding to cut out the middleman; within a couple of months they were working with CognitionCognitionCognition is a U.S. artificial intelligence company founded by Scott Wu, Walden Yan and Steven Hao that develops the autonomous AI software engineer Devin. It launched Devin in March 2024, acquired the AI coding tool Windsurf in July 2025, and announced a Series E exceeding $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation in September 2026. Its annualized revenue passed $1 billion that month.Open the full entry and a leading frontier lab. He said: “Almost immediately, we realized that what the human data market needed was a talent assessment offering.”⁠[3]

On March 20, 2024, the Thiel Foundation announced the 20 members of the 2024 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry. He was first on the list, which gives his hometown as Sunnyvale, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry. The announcement describes Mercor as building AI vetting infrastructure to understand the exact tasks people are good at, with an AI interviewer that asks questions tailored to each candidate’s individual background. Each fellow received $100,000 and access to a network of technology founders, investors, scientists and former fellows, and committed to working full time on their projects, companies or ideas; the class joined 270 previous fellows. Mercor’s other two co-founders, Brendan Foody and Surya Midha, were in the same class.⁠[10][8][9][1]

The Harvard Crimson wrote that five Harvard students were in the class, receiving the $100,000 grants on condition that they drop out; the other four were Christopher ZhuChristopher ZhuChristopher Zhu (usually written Chris Zhu by his company and the press) is a co-founder of Etched, a company that develops specialized inference chips and cluster systems for running large AI models; he is a member of the 2024 class of the Thiel Fellowship.Open the full entry, Gavin UbertiGavin UbertiGavin Uberti is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Etched, a company that develops specialized inference chips and cluster systems for running large AI models, starting with Sohu, a chip designed only for transformer models; he is a member of the 2024 class of the Thiel Fellowship.Open the full entry and Robert WachenRobert WachenRobert Wachen (also Rob Wachen) is the co-founder and president of Etched, a company that builds AI inference chips and cluster systems, and a member of the 2024 class of the Thiel Fellowship.Open the full entry of Etched and Walden YanWalden YanWalden Yan is a co-founder of the AI software engineering company Cognition, where he works on product, and has written about the design of AI agent systems.Open the full entry, a co-founder of Cognition. He said at the time that Mercor had raised more than $3.6 million from General Catalyst and other investors, and added: “As it stands right now, I’m on an indefinite leave of absence and really, really excited to be working on Mercor and changing thousands of lives and creating opportunities around the world.”⁠[5]

Global Indian’s report of December 11, 2024 names him as Mercor’s chief technology officer, with Brendan Foody as chief executive and Surya Midha as chief operating officer; it writes that the three had been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in AI and quotes one of his posts: “It’s been a journey building Mercor with such an amazing team.” Forbes likewise writes that all three appeared on its 2025 Under 30 list.⁠[2][1]

TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in February 2025 that Benchmark backed Mercor’s $32 million Series A in 2024 at a $250 million valuation.⁠[9]

On February 20, 2025, TechCrunch wrote that Mercor had raised a $100 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation, led by Felicis with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, DST GlobalDST GlobalDST Global is a technology investment firm founded by Yuri Milner in 2009 that focuses on growth-stage investments in internet companies worldwide; it has invested in companies including Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Airbnb and Spotify, and in 2026 led the US$400 million Series B round of the AI visual content company Higgsfield.Open the full entry and Menlo Ventures. The article describes the three founders as 21 years old and among the youngest founders of a billion-dollar startup, and names him as chief technology officer. The company’s backers also included Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, Jack Dorsey and Adam D’AngeloAdam D’AngeloAdam D’Angelo is the co-founder and CEO of Quora, a former chief technology officer of Facebook, and a director of OpenAI. From the question-and-answer and knowledge-sharing business he developed the AI chat platform Poe, and he also invests in technology companies. His career spans programming, internet product management, and artificial intelligence governance.Open the full entry.⁠[9]

On the same day the podcast 20VC released an interview with him titled “Adarsh Hiremath, Co-Founder & CTO @ Mercor: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley.” The episode summary says that Mercor had reached $70 million in annual recurring revenue within 24 months; the conversation covered, in order, how debating makes the best founders, scaling and company culture, foundation models and OpenAI versus AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry, synthetic versus human data, the future of programming and software, network effects and marketplaces, and raising money from Benchmark after a helicopter ride.⁠[11]

In March 2025 he said that the founders hoped to build a “unified global labor marketplace”: “If you want to hire anyone for any job, you come to Mercor because it’s the best place to do that.” He said that Mercor “grew north of 40 percent month over month, all of 2024,” that customers including OpenAI “really, really rely on Mercor for their needs,” and that the company had a small staff in San Francisco and India and no sales team, sales being “just the founding team and a couple of members of our team.”⁠[8]

He said that he did not plan to return to Harvard to finish his computer science degree any time soon: “I want to spend 100 percent of my time focusing on that,” and “I’ll be sticking with Mercor forever.” His advice to students was: “My piece of advice would be to not choose the deferred life path and instead jump into things.”⁠[8]

KTVU wrote on March 18, 2025 that Mercor had been valued at $2 billion and that all three founders were 21.⁠[6]

After Mercor announced a $350 million funding round led by Felicis at a $10 billion valuation, Forbes wrote on October 30, 2025 that Mercor had just minted the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, its three 22-year-old founders; the article writes that the new funding made chief executive Brendan Foody, chief technology officer Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha the newest billionaires of the AI boom, each with a stake of roughly 22% in the company by Forbes’s estimate. All three were 22, younger than Mark ZuckerbergMark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, Chairman and CEO of Meta, and a co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His work spans social networking, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry was when he first became a billionaire at 23; Surya Midha, whose birthday is in June, was the youngest of the three by about two months.⁠[1][4]

In the Forbes article he said: “My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time,” and added that “if I weren’t working on Mercor, I would have just graduated college a couple months ago.”⁠[1]

Forbes writes that the founders said they had not bought anything flashy, because they had little free time.⁠[1]

KTVU wrote that the three displaced PolymarketPolymarketPolymarket is a prediction market platform founded by Shayne Coplan in 2020, on which users buy and sell shares in the outcomes of political, sports, financial, cultural, and other events, with trading prices regarded as the market’s estimate of the probability that an event will occur. It rose to prominence during the 2024 US election, returned to the US market in 2025 by acquiring a licensed exchange and clearinghouse, and received a major investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, while facing gambling-regulation and insider-trading scrutiny in US states and several countries.Open the full entry chief executive Shayne CoplanShayne CoplanShayne Coplan is the founder and chief executive officer of Polymarket, the prediction market platform he founded in 2020, and advocates using market prices to aggregate people’s judgments about the probability of events. He attended New York University before leaving to start a company, and has led Polymarket’s fundraising, its return to the U.S. market, and its product expansion.Open the full entry, who had held the distinction for 20 days. Forbes’s profile page states that Surya Midha moved from chief operating officer to chairman in October 2025.⁠[4][1][12]

Forbes’s list of the world’s youngest billionaires (35 under 30), published on March 10, 2026, included him with a net worth of $2.2 billion as of March 1, 2026, an age of 22, United States citizenship and AI software as the source of his wealth; it notes that he started Mercor in 2023 with two high-school friends from the Bay Area who had been on the debate team with him. His Forbes profile page ranks him No. 1913 on the Forbes 2026 Billionaires list.⁠[13][12]

Forbes wrote on July 9, 2026 that, as a person familiar with the fundraising said, Mercor was in talks to raise $500 million at a $20 billion valuation; the article names Brendan Foody and him as co-chief executives and Surya Midha as board chairman, and estimated that if the round closed each of the three founders would be worth $4.3 billion. A Mercor spokesperson declined to comment on the founders’ net worths.⁠[14]

A Felicis profile of July 21, 2026 writes that he had thought his future would be in research and, as co-CEO, leads engineering and product and is building the company’s new Enterprise business. He said that building a cloud network where you could source, vet, screen and onboard these people “is just incredibly challenging to do,” and that “We view evals as a foundational infrastructure investment for all AI deployment and development more generally.” Felicis managing partner Sundeep Peechu said of him and Brendan Foody: “They’ve already proven to be visionary and skillful operators.”⁠[3]

As of November 2026, the mission page of Mercor’s website lists him as co-founder and co-CEO, and the founders’ note on the page is signed by him and Brendan Foody.⁠[15]

As of November 11, 2026, his Forbes profile page shows a real-time net worth of $4.2 billion, ranking him No. 1027 in the world; it lists him as 23 years old, living in San Francisco, a citizen of the United States, with AI software as the self-made source of his wealth his education as a dropout from Harvard University and his marital status as single.⁠[12]

As co-founder and co-CEO of Mercor, he appeared on episode 5 of 1Password1Password1Password is an identity security software company headquartered in Toronto, Canada (contracting entity AgileBits Inc.). It was founded in 2005 by Dave Teare and Roustem Karimov, built its business on the password manager of the same name, and in October 2026 announced that its annual recurring revenue had surpassed $500 million.Open the full entry’s podcast Zero-Shot Learning, “Evals are agent infrastructure,” alongside 1Password’s chief technology officer Nancy Wang and Dev Tagare of Google Gemini. The episode discusses evals as the measurement infrastructure that makes AI agents production-ready: why evals matter for deploying agents, what most teams get wrong in the production rollout process, and why agents fail without company-specific context.⁠[16]

Mercor: Official website: https://www.mercor.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]