The first customer paid $500 a week for one developer. Of that, the engineer took about 70 percent, and Mercor kept the rest. That was the whole business.
Brendan Foody had decided something before he had a company. 'I knew I wanted to drop out before finals my sophomore year,' he told Fortune about leaving Georgetown in the spring of 2023. 'I just didn't go to finals.' He has said he has not taken a day off in three years, and that he thinks about work even at the dinner table with his parents. Where he was born, and what his parents do, are not in anything I could verify, so the want behind the hurry stays unnamed.
The idea was narrow, aimed at freelance programmers in India and an AI interview that vetted them.
His partners were old friends. Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha were his debate teammates at Bellarmine College Preparatory in the Bay Area. All three became Thiel Fellows, and reports say Hiremath left Harvard and Midha left Georgetown. They met again at a hackathon in Sao Paulo in early 2023, where they built the model: match companies with overseas engineers for a cut of each deal.
The idea was narrow, aimed at freelance programmers in India and an AI interview that vetted them. The stakes were small and the margins thin. Then the market shifted under them. AI labs needed experts, including lawyers, doctors and bankers, to write and grade the examples that train chatbots. Mercor pointed its vetting machine at those people. By October 2025 it said it managed about 30,000 contractors, with OpenAI and Anthropic among its customers.
What almost nobody remembers is how small the start was. Five hundred dollars a week is rent for a shared apartment, not a unicorn. The jump from there to a $10 billion valuation, raised as a $350 million round in October 2025, took about two and a half years. The founders were described as the youngest self-made billionaires. In 2026 the CEO said annualized revenue passed $2 billion, a self-reported figure, with most of it paid out to contractors.
The price arrived in March 2026. A supply-chain attack through the LiteLLM package reportedly put up to 4 terabytes of data at risk, including contractor personal information. Class actions followed and Meta paused work. Contractors told The Verge, New York Magazine and Wired of stress and shrinking pay. Reports in July said talks were underway at about a $20 billion valuation; that is not confirmed closed.
A first-time founder can take this from it: Mercor did not need to invent a market. It needed one customer willing to pay, and the sense to notice when a bigger one was knocking.