Adarsh Hiremath grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, where he competed on the speech and debate team with Brendan Foody and Surya Midha.
He enrolled at Harvard in a concurrent B.S. and M.S. computer science program. He left in his sophomore year. All three co-founders later received Thiel Fellowships.
In 2023, at age 22, the three started Mercor. It was first meant to connect freelance programmers in India with US companies. It later became a marketplace of expert contractors for AI labs such as OpenAI.
In October 2025 Mercor raised a $350M Series C at a $10B valuation. That year the three founders became the youngest self-made billionaires.