Mercor co-founder who built its technology (AI interviewer, matching, platform) and, per Forbes, was elevated to co-CEO in 2026 to lead new enterprise offerings. Billionaire on paper (~$2.2B, Forbes July 2026).
medium confidenceSan FranciscoAt Mercor since 2023Updated 2026-09-19
Background
Met Surya Midha at around age 10 and Brendan Foody through debate at Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose. Studied at Harvard before dropping out to become a Thiel Fellow and build Mercor.
On 20VC (Feb 2025) he described Mercor's culture as unusually intense (reported 6 days a week, 9am-9pm).
What they run now
Platform and engineering, and — per Forbes — Mercor's enterprise push (selling expert evaluation/training beyond the frontier labs). Former employees told Forbes he and Foody frequently disagree.
Career
2026 – presentCo-CEO (enterprise), Mercor — per Forbes, April and July 2026; Mercor pages still show CTO
2023 – presentCo-founder & CTO, Mercor
—Harvard University — dropped out; Thiel Fellow
—Bellarmine College Preparatory — high school
On the record
Culture · 2025-02
Defends an intense, high-hours culture as a competitive edge while acknowledging it is hard to preserve while scaling. source
Human vs synthetic data · 2025-02
Discussed synthetic vs human data and marketplace network effects as core to Mercor's defensibility (20VC). source
Recent posts
9 posts archived · most engaged first, then the latest
Traditional coding benchmarks do not reflect how software is actually built and maintained.
That's why we built a new benchmark, APEX-SWE, in partnership with Cognition. It measures whether AI models can perform complex, real-world software engineering work to ship systems that work and debug them when they don't.
APEX-SWE Leaderboard | Pass@1
🥇OpenAI GPT-5.3 Codex (High) at 41.5%
🥈Anthropic Opus 4.6 (High) at 40.5%
🥉Anthropic Opus 4.5 (High) at 38.7%
Every frontier model fails on nearly 60% of real production tasks.
A year ago, our entire company fit into one conference room.
Now, we’ve moved offices twice to keep up with our growth. We’re a team of more than 300 people globally, across engineering, product, and operations. I’m proud of how far we’ve come, and even more energized about where we’re going.
We’ve raised $350 million in a Series C, led by Felicis at a $10 billion valuation. Existing investors Benchmark and General Catalyst also participated.
This raise wasn’t out of necessity. Mercor is profitable and operating from strength. The round was driven by inbound investor interest, and we closed it in 5 days.
We’re hiring across nearly every function. Join us: lnkd.in/gnsMM42e
Mercor is hiring exceptional software engineers in India!
We're building technology that predicts how well someone will perform on the job better than a human can. Think of how a human reviews a resume, conducts an interview, and makes a hiring decision — we’re automating all of that using LLMs. Our tech is so effective, it’s already being used by all the top AI labs.
We’re looking for frontend, backend, and full-stack engineers excited to ship fast and take full ownership. You'd have the opportunity work closely with Srini Rajagopal, Chirag Mahapatra, and our amazing engineering team to build out Mercor's product.
I have now known Aaron Langerman for almost a decade. Brendan Foody, Surya Midha, and I would not be working together if he hadn't changed our lives as an English teacher and debate coach. Beyond privileged to now work with Aaron Langerman every day at Mercor.
The last couple months have been an absolute whirlwind, and we have a couple of exciting announcements to share.
First, we are honored to welcome legendary investor Peter Fenton to Mercor's board. Peter has backed dozens of generational companies early, including Airtable, Twitter, and Yelp.
Second, Sundeep Jain will be joining Mercor as President, bringing decades of marketplace expertise from Uber where he most recently served as CPO and CTO. Brendan Foody, Surya Midha, and I are excited to scale Mercor to the next level alongside Sundeep.
Read more: lnkd.in/gAF-WuE6
If Mercor sells expert evaluation to enterprises (brands, agencies, design-heavy companies), that is the route by which taste/creative evaluation gets bought outside the labs — and he reportedly owns it. Also controls the tooling experts work in.
How to reach
Lower public profile than Foody. Enterprise angle is the hook: a concrete use case for creative/brand evaluation for non-lab enterprise buyers (speculation). Warm path via Felicis or Thiel Fellowship network.
What we could not establish
X handle: @adarsh_exe surfaced in search but no evidence tying it to him was seen — left null.
Exact current title (CTO vs co-CEO) and scope of the enterprise remit.
Miju Labs