SAN FRANCISCO — Mercor has crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue and launched a new Enterprise AI platform, two milestones marking its shift from an AI recruiting startup into core AI economy infrastructure.
- Who Is Brendan Foody?
- Early Life and Childhood Hustles
- Why He Left Georgetown
- Founding Mercor
- From AI Recruiting to AI Infrastructure
- Funding and a Record Growth Curve
- Training the World’s Frontier Models
- Leadership Philosophy and the Future of Work
- What Entrepreneurs Can Learn
- The Bigger Picture
- Frequently Asked Questions
The platform, announced in March 2026, extends Mercor’s expertise training frontier AI models to ordinary businesses deploying AI agents. For Brendan Foody, Mercor’s 23 year old co-founder and CEO, it is the latest proof point in one of the fastest founder journeys in recent memory.
Who Is Brendan Foody?
Brendan Foody is the co-founder and CEO of Mercor, the San Francisco company connecting vetted professionals with AI labs and enterprises that need human expertise to train AI models.
He was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2024 alongside his co-founders, and the trio became the world’s youngest self made billionaires in October 2025, according to Forbes.
Early Life and Childhood Hustles
Foody was born at Stanford Hospital and grew up nearby in the Bay Area, he said during Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series.
His entrepreneurial streak surfaced early. In eighth grade, he noticed Safeway donuts selling for five dollars a dozen and began biking there on Fridays to resell them to classmates, later undercutting a rival to win the market.
During the pandemic, he scaled an AWS credits consulting business for sneaker resellers into a six figure side venture.
Why He Left Georgetown
Foody enrolled at Georgetown to study business administration and economics, with co-founder Surya Midha as his roommate, while Adarsh Hiremath studied at Harvard.
A 2023 hackathon in São Paulo gave the trio their founding idea: matching companies with skilled engineers overseas. Foody left before finals of his sophomore year. “I just didn’t go to finals,” he told Fortune.
Founding Mercor
Mercor, in its current form, was founded January 1, 2023, built on automating resume screening and interviews using large language models, according to Foody.
The three friends had met at 14 on the nationally ranked speech and debate team at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose.
From AI Recruiting to AI Infrastructure
Mercor initially paired largely India based engineers with Foody’s college network. A turning point came when it supplied engineers to Scale AI, then fielded complaints about delayed pay, pushing Foody toward AI labs directly.
Mercor became one of OpenAI’s largest data vendors within months and pivoted toward agentic data: skilled professionals like lawyers, bankers, and doctors building evaluations that shape frontier model behavior, Mercor has said.
That infrastructure now underpins Mercor’s Enterprise AI platform, which turns institutional knowledge into agent behavior and quality checks, co-founder Adarsh Hiremath wrote on Mercor’s blog in March 2026.
Funding and a Record Growth Curve
Mercor raised a $3.6 million seed round led by General Catalyst in 2023, a $30 million Series A led by Benchmark in September 2024 at a $250 million valuation, then a $100 million Series B led by Felicis in February 2025 at $2 billion.
An October 2025 Series C of $350 million, also led by Felicis, lifted the valuation fivefold to $10 billion. That round made Foody, Hiremath, and Midha, each holding roughly a 22 percent stake, the world’s youngest self made billionaires, worth about $2.2 billion each, according to Forbes.
Mercor also acquired Sepal AI in February 2026, adding reinforcement learning environment capabilities for complex research tasks.
Training the World’s Frontier Models
Mercor’s core business builds the rubrics, evaluations, and expert generated data that AI labs use to benchmark and improve their models, testing real professional work in law, finance, consulting, and software engineering.
In March 2026, Mercor introduced APEX SWE with Cognition to measure frontier models on real engineering tasks. Even the top performer managed only a 41.5 percent pass rate, according to Mercor.
Leadership Philosophy and the Future of Work
Foody argues productivity gains expand available work rather than eliminating it, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing worker productivity rose twentyfold over 225 years without shrinking the job market.
He expects AI to automate most knowledge work within years, but views full automation as a multi decade process, since much real work involves physical and long horizon tasks models still struggle with.
On education, Foody has urged schools to build assessments around AI tools rather than block them, comparing resistance to AI with old resistance to calculators.
What Entrepreneurs Can Learn
Foody credits Mercor’s speed to watching “leading indicators”: where sophisticated customers spend money, rather than what they say they want.
He has also said obsession beats discipline. Instead of forcing himself through unfulfilling work, he searched for something he could not stop thinking about, a trait he says the Thiel Fellowship specifically screens for in young founders.
A third lesson is staying close to customers and early design partners, which he calls the most important habit for testing whether a product is useful.
The Bigger Picture
Brendan Foody’s rise is not just another AI startup story. It captures a real shift in how human expertise and machine intelligence are starting to work together.
Mercor’s business rests on a wager Foody has stated plainly: AI will keep improving at tasks it can verify, but human judgment and taste will remain the bottleneck for years.
That is why Mercor pays doctors, lawyers, and engineers not to compete with AI but to teach it, treating expertise as a renewable resource rather than a threat. It is a story worth bookmarking as this wager plays out across the next decade of work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Brendan Foody?
Brendan Foody is the co-founder and CEO of Mercor, an AI talent and infrastructure company, and one of the world’s youngest self made billionaires.
What is Mercor?
Mercor connects vetted professionals with AI labs and enterprises that need human expertise to train and evaluate AI models and agents.
Why did Brendan Foody start Mercor?
Foody and his co-founders started Mercor after a 2023 hackathon revealed demand for matching skilled engineers with companies, later pivoting toward AI training data.
How does Mercor help train AI models?
Mercor builds evaluation rubrics and benchmarks, including its APEX series, using expert professionals to measure model performance on real work.
What can entrepreneurs learn from Brendan Foody?
Track leading indicators, find work you cannot stop thinking about, and stay close to customers while iterating quickly.
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Isabella is a global business journalist and former McKinsey analyst from Brazil. She brings sharp insights on economic shifts, policies, and founder journeys from around the world.
