3 College dropouts beat Zuckerberg to become youngest billionaires at 22 — you won't believe the IIT connection

3 College Dropouts Beat Zuckerberg to Become Youngest Billionaires at 22

Move over, Mark Zuckerberg. The title of the world's youngest self-made billionaire now belongs to a trio of 22-year-olds, and their story is deeply intertwined with a strategic bet on Indian engineering talent, starting with the IITs.

Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, the founders of the AI recruiting juggernaut Mercor, have officially surpassed Zuckerberg's record after a massive $350 million funding round valued their company at a staggering $10 billion. But behind the Silicon Valley fairy tale of dorm-room dropouts lies a less-told, pivotal chapter: the founders' early and critical partnership with India's premier tech institutions, which shaped their vision for a globalized future of work.

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Before Mercor was a $10 billion AI platform, it was a scrappy software development shop. The founders, while still in college at Harvard and Georgetown, were building projects for their entrepreneur friends. But demand quickly outstripped their capacity. To scale, they made a crucial decision: they would tap into the global talent pool.

As co-founder Brendan Foody recounted in an interview, "We partnered with the code club at IIT Kharagpur and a couple of the other IITs to hire engineers."

This wasn't just outsourcing; it was a revelation. The founders were "amazed" by the "phenomenally talented people" they encountered—engineers whose potential was vast, but whose access to top global opportunities was limited by a fragmented and inefficient hiring system.

This direct exposure to world-class talent in India became the core inspiration for Mercor. They saw the problem firsthand: a brilliant engineer in India might only apply to a few dozen local jobs, while a startup in Silicon Valley would struggle to find them amidst the noise. The manual process of connecting this supply and demand was broken.

This insight resonated deeply with the founders' own cross-cultural experiences. Adarsh Hiremath, who studied Computer Science at Harvard before dropping out, and Surya Midha, a second-generation Indian immigrant from New Delhi, understood the bridges between markets. Reflecting on his whirlwind journey, Hiremath 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.”

That "180" was powered by a vision born from their work with IITians. They realized that AI could do what humans could not at scale: review resumes, conduct in-depth interviews, and match candidates with companies across the globe. The initial model of manually connecting IIT talent with their network evolved into an ambition to create a "global unified labor market."

The IITians they collaborated with weren't just contractors; they were the catalyst that proved a global, AI-powered hiring platform was not just possible, but necessary. Mercor’s $10 billion valuation is, in part, a valuation of the untapped potential they first witnessed in the coding clubs of IIT Kharagpur.