During the spring of 2023, as his Georgetown peers were preparing for final exams, Brendan Foody was actively experimenting with his novel approach to work.
TL;DR
- Brendan Foody dropped out of Georgetown to found Mercor, a company connecting businesses with international engineers.
- Mercor trains AI using uniquely human knowledge like judgment and taste, employing professionals for evaluation.
- In nine months, Mercor generated $1 million revenue, becoming a $10 billion company and making founders billionaires.
- Foody believes AI redistributes work, enabling humans to focus on higher-level tasks and innovation.
“I knew I wanted to drop out before finals my sophomore year,” he told Coins2Day. “I just didn’t go to finals.”
By that point, Foody had discovered something beyond academic instruction. Several months prior, at a São Paulo hackathon, he and his fellow founders had identified a straightforward yet effective approach: connect businesses with qualified engineers internationally, manage all the necessary arrangements, and receive a modest commission from each transaction. Their initial customer consented to a weekly payment of $500 for a developer; Mercor compensated the engineer approximately 70% of that amount, retaining the remainder as a service charge.
Initially conceived as a method to link skilled individuals, it later developed into a more significant endeavor: a platform enabling people to assist in training the AI systems that could potentially supersede them. Mercor currently employs experts such as consultants, legal professionals, financiers, and physicians to develop “evals” and evaluation criteria for assessing and improving model logic.
“Everyone’s been focused on what models can do,” Foody said. “But the real opportunity is teaching them what only humans know—judgment, nuance, and taste.”
In just nine months, he and his co-founders, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, who were high school friends and debate teammates, transformed that nascent concept into a business generating $1 million in revenue annually. The trio's swift achievements served more as a validation of their idea than sheer luck, demonstrating that the methodical thinking honed during their debate days could be formalized to instruct machines in reasoning.
Two years later, Mercor has become a $10 billion company, turning the trio into the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. The product of that São Paulo experiment had transformed into one of the fastest-scaling startups of the AI era, attracting major investors who view it as a linchpin in the future of human-in-the-loop automation.
To Foody, the leap from college dropout to billionaire founder was rational.
“When I was in college, work was something I had to be disciplined to do,” he said. “When I started Mercor, it became something I couldn’t stop thinking about.”
For three years straight, Foody hasn't had a single day off. He admits that even during family dinners, his mind remains on his job, which he doesn't perceive as actual labor.
“People burn out when they work hard on things that don’t feel compounding,” he explained. “I see the ROI of my time every day.”
This perspective has formed the central philosophy behind Mercor's objective. According to Foody, AI isn't displacing workers; it's redistributing them. With software handling routine office duties, people will advance to higher-level roles, instructing machines on how to think, make choices, and innovate.
“It’s like we have this bottleneck of only so much human labor in the economy,” he said. “That shape is going to change radically over the next decade.”
Mercor addresses the bottleneck by enabling businesses to assign numerous micro-tasks that assess model performance within actual professional settings, such as composing a financial memo, preparing a legal document, or examining a medical record. Human reviewers score each result using specific criteria, providing structured feedback to the model. Each assessment contributes to the AI's understanding of human decision-making processes and quality assessment methods.
At the center of that system is APEX—the AI Productivity Index, Mercor’s proprietary benchmark for assessing how well AI performs economically valuable work. Rather than test abstract reasoning or mathematical puzzles, APEX evaluates large models on 200 tasks drawn from the workflows of investment bankers, lawyers, consultants, and physicians. To build it, Mercor enlisted a heavyweight advisory group that includes former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, ex-McKinsey managing partner Dominic Barton, legal scholar Cass Sunstein, and cardiologist Eric Topol. Each helped design the evaluation rubrics and case structures to mirror the realities of high-stakes professional labor.
As the company puts it: “It’s great to have 10,000 PhDs in your pocket—it’s even better to have a model that can reliably do your taxes.”
The implications of Mercor’s success are sweeping. In Foody’s eyes, this new labor market could employ millions of people globally while accelerating AI progress.
“We’ll automate maybe two-thirds of knowledge work,” he said. “And that’ll be incredible, because it lets us do things like cure cancer and go to Mars.”
For investors, Mercor’s growth story is irresistible. It sits at the intersection of two seismic shifts: the mainstreaming of AI and the rise of flexible, project-based work. Each corporate client adds new evaluators, and each evaluator helps refine more models, creating a flywheel of both data and demand.
“We have one of the fastest revenue ramps of any company in history,” Foody said matter-of-factly.
Foody likes to describe it as the next industrial revolution. He knows people are afraid of being replaced by AI, and constantly fields questions on the ethics of training AI to replace jobs. Foody argues we ought to just bite the bullet.
“It’s easy to fall into a Luddite mindset and see productivity gains as bad because they cause short-term job losses,” Foody said. “But every major technical revolution has ultimately made life better.”
After the industrial revolution, the economy went from 75% of Americans working as farmers to about 1%, and that freed people to do everything else, Foody said.
“The challenge now is to be thoughtful about what comes next: the higher, better things humans will spend time on,” Foody said, “and how quickly we can help make that future real.”