When Adarsh S. Hiremath dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year to work on his startup Mercor — an artificial intelligence-powered hiring platform — he had not raised any money for his project.
“I wouldn’t say there was some specific logical thing that gave me the confidence to pursue Mercor,” he said. “It was more so just an emotional pull, right, that feeling that you want to be working on the problem, you want to be working with the people that you’re working with, and it just feels right in terms of an opportunity to spend a bunch of time working on and dedicating your whole life to.”
A year later, in March 2024, Hiremath and his startup’s co-founders — Brendan Foody and Surya Midha — received $100,000 from the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program offering enterprising students access to professional networks to grow their startups under the condition that they drop out of college.
Now, their hiring platform has expanded their client base to include big-name companies like Open-AI, and in February, Mercor received a valuation of $2 billion dollars from venture capital firm Felicis, raising $100 million more to continue to build out their platform.
The founders hope to one day build a “unified global labor marketplace,” Hiremath said.
“If you want to hire anyone for any job, you come to Mercor because it’s the best place to do that,” Hiremath added.
Mercor uses AI to automate the hiring process, from resume screening to interviewing and payroll management. Hiremath said that the idea for the startup came to him and his co-founders during a software development shop, when they realized that finding personnel to build software for startups can often be difficult and time consuming.
“A startup would come to us with a request for some type of software they’d want built, and then we’d build it with a team that we recruited,” Hiremath said.
“And very, very quickly, we realized that the magic was actually in the really, really exceptional people that we’re finding,” he added.
Initially, the company focused on recruiting software engineers and technology professionals for other startups to build and develop software. But Mercor has since broadened its horizons to serve companies looking to recruit from a much wider talent pool.
“We grew north of 40 percent month over month, all of 2024,” he said. “That growth is actually only accelerating into 2025.”
Hiremath said that Mercor’s customers, including OpenAI among other artificial intelligence labs and hyperscalers, “really, really rely on Mercor for their needs.”
Despite the funding, Mercor’s employee base has remained small, located in San Francisco and India. According to Hiremath, Mercor does not even have a sales team.
“The sales team is just the founding team and a couple of members of our team, and the customer inbound has been sort of crazy,” he said.
With Mercor’s continuing growth, Hiremath doesn’t see himself returning to Harvard to complete his computer science degree anytime soon. Both Foody and Midha officially withdrew from Georgetown at the same time that Hiremath dropped out of Harvard.
“It’s not really something I’ve thought about yet,” Hiremath said. “I think the main way that I’ve wrapped my head around it is that Mercor is just such an incredible and exciting opportunity, and I want to spend 100 percent of my time focusing on that.”
“I’ll be sticking with Mercor forever,” he added. The vision that we have is just incredibly large and will take a lot of time and blood, sweat and tears to execute on.”
For students interested in pursuing a similar path, Hiremath’s advice is to avoid thinking there is a set path for reaching your goals.
“It can be very, very easy to sort of rationalize a set of prerequisites, right? ‘I need to do this before starting a company, I need to do that before joining an early stage startup’ and stuff like that,” Hiremath said.
“My piece of advice would be to not choose the deferred life path and instead jump into things,” he added.
—Staff writer Thamini Vijeyasingam can be reached at thamini.vijeyasingam@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @vijeyasingam.