Brendan Foody is excited about the future. He said so the moment we stepped into Lands End — not the park, but a glass-walled conference room inside Mercor’s swanky new headquarters at 181 Fremont St.

“Look at the view of Salesforce Park,” Foody said, flashing a wide grin and ushering me over to the glass windows, which revealed an elongated expanse of native plants. “This is what the future will look like, full of beautiful parks in the sky.” 

Foody, 22, is CEO of Mercor, a startup that enlists thousands of white-collar professionals to train AI models built by companies like OpenAI and Meta. These highly skilled contract workers, many of whom have Ph.D.s, law degrees, and Wall Street pedigrees, are paid up to $200 an hour to train AI chatbots to behave like humans. 

It might sound like Mercor is gleefully heralding in the white-collar bloodbath (opens in new tab) that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned about. But Foody disagrees, in spite of Anthropic being a Mercor customer. He believes that humans will spend the next decade teaching machines how to do knowledge work with the “judgment, nuance, and taste that only humans possess,” freeing us to pursue passion projects and enjoy a world of material abundance. 

When I pressed Foody on his utopian vision, and why he thinks tech companies won’t hoard the spoils of the AI boom, he waved his hand and described a future in which everyone has $10 million in purchasing power, lives in a nice apartment, and works only if they want to. 

“I don’t believe in the doomsday predictions,” Foody said later, as we walked through Salesforce Park. “While everyone’s talking about job displacement, we’re building arguably the largest new category of work.” 

Foody has reason to be starry-eyed. Mercor is less than 3 years old and just bagged a $350 million funding round that valued the company at $10 billion. The round quintupled the startup’s February valuation and makes Foody and his 22-year-old cofounders, CTO Adarsh Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha, the youngest self-made tech billionaires in history (opens in new tab). (They just beat out Mark Zuckerberg — a billionaire at 23 — whose company previously occupied the building they’ve moved into.)

As opposed to Zuckerberg in his early twenties, Foody has charisma and charm far beyond his years. He told me he hasn’t done anything to celebrate his 10-figure status yet, though he did donate to his mother’s charity, which works to revitalize downtown Menlo Park. 

Mercor’s surge reflects the AI frenzy gripping investors, who are offering founders sky-high valuations to shoulder in on deals that might just be the next breakout company. As part of courting Mercor, Felicis Ventures, the firm that led the recent Series C, flew the founders to Vegas on a private jet to race Ferraris and talk shop.

It also underscores Mercor’s rapid growth since Meta bought a 49% stake in its rival, Scale AI, for $14.3 billion in June. The move for AI dominance prompted major players like OpenAI and Google DeepMind to cut ties with Scale and shift their business to competitors like Mercor and Surge AI. 

Mercor hit $500 million in annualized revenue run rate in September, up from $100 million just six months earlier, making it one of the fastest-growing startups in tech. Each day, Mercor pays some $1.5 million to contractors, and wildly enough, it’s still profitable.

There’s no way to know how long the ride will last. Mercor’s fortunes are inextricably tied to a handful of AI labs, and even Sam Altman has warned that we’re in an AI bubble (opens in new tab). Big players, too, are moving into Mercor’s corner. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said this week that the company will become a “platform for work (opens in new tab),” offering gigs for training AI. 

Foody envisions a world in which Mercor pays tens of billions to contractors each day as the training of machines becomes a dominant labor category. To critics, that sounds like a dystopian gig economy. But Mercor sees it as meeting the demands of a future that’s already taking shape.

“There are things we’ve done very well, but there’s a lot where we got lucky,” said Foody. “Like, from the time we were born, to being perfectly positioned to go after one of the most exciting market vacuums in history.”

The company’s origins go back to a trip Foody and his cofounders took to São Paulo as college sophomores. Foody and Midha were students at Georgetown; Hiremath was at Harvard. But instead of a South American getaway for Carnaval, the trio took part in a three-week hackathon hosted by Prod, a secretive startup accelerator run by Harvard and MIT students. 

“Our parents were terrified, and they thought it was a scam,” said Foody. But the three friends, all children of software engineers who met through their high school debate team in San Jose, decided to fly to Brazil anyway. They came back from São Paulo with every other hackathon team as a customer. 

Initially, Mercor connected engineers in India with U.S. firms seeking freelance coding talent — an idea that grew out of their high school side hustle building websites. They would charge a few thousand dollars per project, then hire engineers in India to help build the software. To scale the business, they built a platform that vets and recruits technical talent through an interview with an AI avatar before matching them with companies. 

One of their first wins was helping Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe assemble a team of engineers to build Phia, an AI-powered shopping tool she launched this year (opens in new tab) with entrepreneur Sophia Kianni. 

Following the AI whiz-kid playbook, the next step was for the three to drop out of school and expand the types of talent available on their platform. By early 2024, Mercor had interviewed 100,000 white-collar professionals. As a result, the company inadvertently compiled a huge network of specialized workers, who could be deployed to train increasingly sophisticated chatbots. 

A big break came last year, when Foody landed a meeting with OpenAI’s head of human data operations, Shaun VanWeelden, after spamming him with emails. VanWeelden suggested they meet at Bar Gemini in the Mission. 

“Fortunately, he ordered deviled eggs instead of drinks, so I didn’t have to tell him I was only 20 years old,” Foody said.

VanWeelden told him that OpenAI was interested in using Mercor’s platform to find Math Olympiad winners who could help train their AI models. Foody recalls that his team hired 25 Olympiads in a single day, and he went back to OpenAI to see if Mercor could secure a contract.

“They were like, ‘Holy shit, this is crazy,’” Foody said. “That was our in.”

Mercor’s new headquarters span three floors of 181 Fremont. When I visited one Friday in October, the office buzzed with the quiet intensity of a university library. Twentysomethings were hunched over laptops on beanbags and standing desks, some in Mercor T-shirts and others in Halloween costumes.

The culture may be youthful, but Mercor has brought in seasoned adults to help run the company. VanWeelden, 33, the OpenAI staffer who gave them their big break, is now managing director. Sundeep Jain, 54, Uber’s former chief product officer, joined as president in May. 

Mercor even hired the founders’ former Bellarmine College Preparatory debate coach, Aaron Langerman, to help scale the company and improve its internal systems. Langerman joined his former students because of the potential he sees for AI to improve education and free up teachers from cumbersome administrative work. 

“I think we’re really asking a deeply philosophical question here at Mercor, which is, ‘How do we imbue human intelligence into machines so that we can unlock human potential?’” Langerman said. 

In just a year, Mercor has grown from fewer than 20 employees to more than 200 in the U.S. and 100 overseas. Virat Talwar, the first employee, said that despite its growth, the company is trying to hold onto its scrappy origins. 

“You don’t become the fastest-growing company in the world by clocking in at 9 and clocking out at 5,” he said. Job postings specify that candidates should be willing to work six days a week, though the company says employees are mandated to work in the office the normal five days. 

Foody works at a standing desk in the open office, like every other employee. He walked me to his area, which had a pair of custom Air Jordan 1 Highs perched on a storage rack. They’re black with a dark-blue swoosh and have “MERCOR” printed across the side panels — a gift from Felicis after the latest funding round closed. 

On his desk was a copy of The Wall Street Journal, where news about Mercor’s $10 billion valuation broke last week on the front page of the Business & Finance section. The lead story that day, printed above it, detailed Amazon’s plans to cut up to 30,000 jobs (opens in new tab). 

“This perfectly shows the moment we’re in,” said Foody. “Amazon is laying off thousands of people, and we’re creating thousands of jobs.”