Brendan Foody – Mercor

When researching Gen Z entrepreneurs, I came across Brendan Foody. He’s the CEO of Mercor, an AI recruiting company, and he’s only 22. He started Mercor in 2023 with two friends from his high school debate team, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha. They started small, trying to connect engineers in India with US companies that needed freelance programmers. Then the AI boom hit, and AI companies needed tons of skilled people to help train their models, so Mercor went after this market. They saw where the demand was going and followed it.

By October 2025, Mercor was making about $500 million in annual revenue, up from $100 million just seven months earlier. That same month it was valued at $10 billion. Each of the three friends owns about 22% of the company, making them the youngest self-made billionaires ever and surpassing Mark Zuckerberg. What gets me is how quick it happened, since they only started in 2023.

Foody also has a big idea about the future. He thinks work is going to be more task-based instead of full-time jobs, and that training AI could become one of the biggest types of work in the world. A lot of people are worried that AI will take jobs, but he says Mercor is creating new ones.

I think Foody is a good example of a Gen Z entrepreneur because he and his friends grew up with this technology and saw where it was going before a lot of people did. They didn’t wait until they were older or had more experience. They started with a simple idea, stuck with their friends, and built something huge.