Adarsh Hiremath

Adarsh Hiremath helped turn Mercor from an AI recruitment experiment into an infrastructure company connecting specialist human knowledge with model training, evaluation and enterprise systems. His 2025–2026 work combines benchmark design, organisational context and the difficult operational task of verifying expertise at scale.

Adarsh Hiremath co-founded Mercor with Brendan Foody and Surya Midha while still in his early twenties. As founding chief technology officer, he helped build the company’s initial semantic-search and automated-interview systems. The company subsequently moved beyond conventional recruitment, supplying domain experts for model training, reinforcement learning and evaluation. By 2026, Hiremath and Foody were serving as co-chief executives. Hiremath’s most attributable recent work is unusually concrete. In March 2026 he co-authored APEX-SWE, a benchmark developed with Cognition to test models on production software-engineering tasks rather than isolated coding exercises. At release, its leading system achieved 41.5% pass@1, indicating substantial remaining limitations. Two days later, Hiremath personally introduced Mercor Enterprise AI, a proposed context layer for helping organisations identify, configure and assess internal agents. The company reported rapid financial and contractor growth, including more than US$1 billion in annualised revenue by May 2026 and over 30,000 contractors paid weekly. These are company statements, not audited public-company disclosures. Rapid expansion also brought material control challenges: independent reporting in April 2026 described employee fraud and identity-verification incidents, including suspected North Korean operatives. Those issues do not erase the contribution, but they form part of its record.