00:00Today on Forbes, the world's youngest self-made billionaires are a trio of 22-year-old AI founders.
00:09Merkor, a recruiting startup that helps Silicon Valley's biggest AI labs to train their models,
00:15has just minted the world's youngest self-made billionaires, the company's three 22-year-old
00:21founders, a trio of Bay Area high school friends who competed together on their debate team.
00:26Earlier this week, the San Francisco startup announced a $350 million funding round led by
00:33Felicis Ventures with participation from other bigwigs Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood,
00:40valuing the company at $10 billion. The new infusion of cash makes CEO Brendan Fudi, CTO Adarsh Hiramath,
00:49and board chairman Surya Mida the newest billionaires of the AI boom,
00:54each with a roughly 22% stake in the company, Forbes estimates.
00:59Fudi told Forbes, quote,
01:01It's definitely crazy. It feels very surreal, obviously beyond our wildest imaginations,
01:07insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.
01:11Even in youth-obsessed Silicon Valley, where neophyte founders have been lionized for decades,
01:17Merkor is particularly well-known for the young age of its leaders.
01:20All three founders are Thiel Fellows, members of conservative billionaire investor Peter Thiel's
01:26program, to dole out $100,000 grants every year to young people in exchange for foregoing college.
01:34They've become the poster children of the AI era's 20-something entrepreneurs.
01:38Hiramath, who spent two years at Harvard before dropping out after sophomore year, said, quote,
01:44The thing that's crazy for me is, if I weren't working on Merkor, I would have just graduated college a couple months ago.
01:51My life did such a 180 in such a short period of time.
01:54The Merkor founders' new status puts them at the top of the list of young tech entrepreneurs
02:01whose personal fortunes have recently hit the billion-dollar mark.
02:05They supplant Polymarket CEO Shane Copland as the world's youngest self-made billionaires.
02:11Copland, who is 27 years old, held the title for just 20 days,
02:15after a $2 billion investment from NYSE Parent Intercontinental Exchange.
02:20Before that, Scale AI's Alexander Wang, who is 28 years old,
02:26had bragging rights as the youngest self-made billionaire for roughly 18 months.
02:30His Scale AI co-founder, Lucy Guo, meanwhile,
02:33became the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire at age 30,
02:37taking that rank from none other than Taylor Swift.
02:41Even more notable is just how young they are.
02:45At age 22, they are all younger than Mark Zuckerberg was
02:48when he first became a billionaire at 23.
02:52Meeta, whose birthday is in June,
02:54is the youngest of the co-founders by roughly two months.
02:57The only self-made entrepreneur who has made an earlier debut
03:00is Kylie Jenner at age 21,
03:02though Forbes later knocked down her fortune and ran an investigation,
03:06stating that the makeup mogul had inflated her Kylie Cosmetics revenue.
03:10Foodie, Hiramath, and Meeta founded Merkor in 2023,
03:14originally with the mission of matching engineers in India
03:17with U.S. companies in need of freelance coders.
03:21They built a recruiting platform
03:22that allowed applicants to interview with AI avatars
03:25and match them to companies in need of talent.
03:28In the process, they stumbled into the in-demand world of data labeling,
03:32pairing expert-level contractors like PhDs and lawyers
03:36with frontier labs like OpenAI.
03:38All three appeared on Forbes' 2025 Under-30 list.
03:43In September, shortly after Merkor debuted on the Forbes Cloud 100 list
03:47of top private cloud computing companies,
03:50Foodie announced the company had hit $500 million in annualized revenue run rate,
03:55up from $100 million in March.
03:57As Bay Area natives, Foodie and the others grew up around tech.
04:02All three are the children of software engineers.
04:05Foodie's mom worked for Meeta's real estate team,
04:07and his dad founded a graphics interface company in the 90s
04:10before turning to startup advising.
04:13Hiramath and Meeta were childhood friends
04:15who met when they were 10 years old,
04:17competing in elementary school debate tournaments.
04:19They met Foodie in high school debate.
04:22As new billionaires, the founders say
04:24they haven't gone out and bought anything flashy
04:26because they just don't have the time.
04:29Foodie said, quote,
04:30I leave the office around 10.30 p.m. on an average day, six days a week,
04:35and so there's not a whole lot of time outside of that
04:37to be distracted by things outside of the business.
04:41For full coverage, check out Richard Nieva's piece on Forbes.com.
04:46This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
04:49Thanks for tuning in.
05:00Thanks for tuning in.
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