Meet the 22-year-old founders who broke Mark Zuckerberg’s record

Three 22-year-old founders of the rapidly rising AI recruitment startup Mercor have officially become the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, breaking Mark Zuckerberg’s long-standing record of joining the Forbes' billionaire list at age 23.

According to Forbes, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha secured a massive $350 million funding round, valuing Mercor at $10 billion.

The deal instantly pushed all three into billionaire territory, making Silicon Valley’s newest success story a trio of Gen-Z founders who left college behind to build their dream company.

Two of the co-founders, Midha and Hiremath, are Indian-American, who first met at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose.

They bonded on the school’s elite debate team and made national history by becoming the first duo to win all three major policy debate championships in a single year.

“If I weren’t working on Mercor, I would have just graduated a few months ago. My life did such a 180 so fast,” Hiremath, who studied computer science at Harvard before dropping out, told Forbes.

Meanwhile, Midha pursued a degree in foreign service at Georgetown University, where he met Foody, who was studying economics.

Notably, all three founders are also Thiel Fellows, backed by billionaire Peter Thiel’s programme that funds young entrepreneurs who choose to leave college to build startups.