Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath founded Mercor when they were 21. They are now 22, worth more than a billion dollars each, and running a company valued at billion whose core business is making human hiring decisions faster, cheaper, and increasingly unnecessary. The irony is not lost on the people writing about them, though it appears to be lost on no one more than the founders themselves, who are quite open about what they are building.
Mercor is an AI-driven talent marketplace. Companies use it to find, screen, and evaluate candidates without the traditional machinery of recruiters, HR departments, and multi-round interview processes. The platform's AI predicts performance in technical roles, reducing hiring timelines from months to hours. It has attracted over 100,000 domain experts — physicians, lawyers, PhD researchers, engineers — who use it to find contract work with AI labs and tech companies. Annualized revenue hit million by late 2025, up from million in March of that year.
Bloomberg ran a piece this week framing Mercor's approach with characteristic directness: an AI company hiring on LinkedIn wants to train your replacement at work. The framing is reductive but not inaccurate. Mercor's supply side — the experts it places — often work on projects that involve training AI systems to do what those experts do. The loop is tight and deliberate.
The founders would likely push back on the characterization as doom-saying. Their argument is the standard one: automation changes the shape of work, it does not eliminate it, and the workers who learn to use new tools will do better than those who do not. The argument is partially correct and, like most partially correct arguments made by very young billionaires about the consequences of their products for everyone else, worth holding at arm's length.
Mercor is two years old and worth billion. The hiring industry it is disrupting is worth trillions. The next few years will determine whether the platform is a more efficient version of the existing system or a replacement for it. Midha and Hiremath, to their credit, seem to think it will be the latter. They are probably right.