(MENAFN- Live Mint) Three 22-year-old entrepreneurs behind the fast-growing AI recruitment startup Mercor have become the world's youngest self-made billionaires - surpassing Mark Zuckerberg, who joined Forbes' billionaire list at age 23 in 2008. According to Forbes, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, who founded Mercor in San Francisco, recently raised $350 million in new funding, valuing their company at $10 billion. The latest investment has propelled the trio-Foody as CEO, Hiremath as CTO, and Midha as board chairman-into billionaire status.

School friends turned entrepreneurs

Two of the founders, Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath, are Indian Americans who first met at Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys school in San Jose, California. The pair were standout members of the school's debate team and became the first duo to win all three major national policy debate tournaments in a single year, Forbes reported.

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Hiremath, who is of Indian origin, later attended Harvard University to study computer science but dropped out after two years to focus fully on Mercor. Reflecting on his journey, he told Forbes,“The thing that's crazy for me is, if I weren't working on Mercor, I would have just graduated college a couple of months ago. My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time.”

While Hiremath was at Harvard, Midha studied foreign service at Georgetown University, where Foody was also enrolled, studying economics. Both left Georgetown around the same time as Hiremath to dedicate themselves to building Mercor.

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All three are Thiel Fellows, supported by billionaire investor Peter Thiel's fellowship, which funds young entrepreneurs who choose to leave college to build startups.

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Their achievement comes just weeks after Shayne Coplan, 27, founder of Polymarket, joined the Forbes billionaire list following a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.

Previously, Alexandr Wang, 28, founder of Scale AI, held the record as the youngest self-made billionaire for 18 months. His co-founder, Lucy Guo, became the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire at 30, overtaking Taylor Swift.

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