AI startup Mercor announced a new funding round Tuesday that increased the company’s valuation to $20 billion, up from $10 billion a year ago.
Mercor cofounder and CEO Brendan Foody
Cody Pickens for Forbes
Mercor’s three 23-year-old cofounders just doubled their fortunes after their company announced Tuesday it raised $750 million from investors including Benchmark, General Catalyst, Nvidia and Salesforce. At Mercor’s new $20 billion valuation, Forbes estimates that CEO Brendan Foody, CTO Adarsh Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha are worth $4.2 billion each from their 21% stakes in the company.
That’s up from $2.2 billion in October 2025, when Mercor raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation and made its three cofounders the world’s youngest self-made billionaires at the age of 22. They supplanted Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, who was 27 at the time, and beat out Mark Zuckerberg, who first became a billionaire at age 23, for the title of youngest self-made billionaire ever. They still hold both titles today. (Midha is the youngest cofounder by roughly two months). Mercor declined to comment on Forbes’ net worth estimates.
Foody, Hiremath and Midha—who met through high school debate—founded Mercor in 2023, originally as a recruiting startup to match freelance coders in India with U.S. companies. Over time, they stumbled into data labeling—pairing experts like doctors or lawyers with frontier labs including OpenAI.
The company said in a press release that its fresh funding will be used to build out Mercor’s new evaluation and post-training business, which helps companies improve AI models by providing ways to measure how well they complete tasks. The bet on evaluations and post-training comes as companies across industries have increasingly adopted AI agents, creating a need to assess and fine-tune these agents before they are deployed to interact with a company’s customers, code or data without human oversight.
Foody said in an X post Tuesday that Mercor has grown from $1 million to $3 billion in gross annualized revenue—or $250 million of gross sales in its latest month—in just over two years and doubled its customers from last year to more than 100.
In July, The Information reported that Mercor is profitable on a free cash flow basis and that it pays out 60% to 70% of its gross revenue to contractors. Mercor has grown from less than 40 employees a year ago to roughly 300 this year.
Mercor’s rapid rise hasn’t come without hiccups. In April, Mercor said it was among thousands of companies hit by a hack linked to open source project LiteLLM—prompting Meta to pause its work with the startup, while OpenAI and other labs investigated whether their proprietary training data had been exposed.
That came on top of an embezzlement scandal, in which an early manager on Mercor’s Anthropic account allegedly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses to his brother and father. Mercor employees also suspected that North Korean operatives had used stolen credentials to work for the company, multiple sources familiar with the matter told Forbes in April.
Mercor’s valuation still trails that of its closest rivals, Scale AI (valued at around $29 billion when Meta bought 49% of the company in June 2025) and Surge AI (valued by Forbes at an estimated $24 billion). Scale AI cofounder Alex Wang, 29, was overtaken as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by Polymarket’s Coplan in October 2025, just 20 days before the Mercor folks passed him. Polymarket rival Kalshi’s cofounder Luana Lopes Lara, 30, is the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire.
Unlike its rival Scale AI, Mercor doesn’t appear to be for sale. “We’ve gotten a lot of acquisition interest, like I could walk away with billions of dollars in cash,” Foody said on a podcast in June. “The thing is that’s just not what motivates me.”
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