Mercor's 23-Year-Old Billionaire CEO Acquires Deeptune in Calculated AI Training Power Play

Brendan Foody, who founded AI hiring and training platform Mercor at age 19 and is now 23, has orchestrated the acquisition of Deeptune — an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that builds simulation environments for AI agents. The deal, revealed exclusively, is notable for how it was engineered: Foody quietly invested in Deeptune's $43 million Series A just three months before closing the acquisition, and he's candid that the angel check was written with the buyout already in mind. A16z, which backed both companies, effectively funded Mercor's future target while Foody secured a strategic foothold before making his move.

Deeptune's core product is essentially a flight simulator for AI agents — digital replicas of enterprise software like Excel, Salesforce, and Slack where models can practice tasks, fail, and learn before touching live production systems. That capability slots directly into Mercor's existing business: the company's network of over five million domain experts already designs tasks and scoring rubrics that evaluate whether an AI model completed a job correctly. Deeptune supplies the sandboxed app environments those tasks run inside. Together, the two companies cover the full reinforcement learning stack that frontier labs increasingly need.

The numbers behind Mercor are striking. The company hit $2 billion in annual recurring revenue in June 2025, doubling from $1 billion the year prior — a trajectory Foody describes as the fastest growth from $1 million to $2 billion ARR in history, achieved in just 24 months. Foody claims all of the Magnificent Seven except Tesla are customers, and that the company is already the market leader in building reinforcement learning environments for AI. Mercor is currently valued at $10 billion.

The acquisition follows a serious March data breach in which hackers exploited a vulnerability in LiteLLM, an open-source Python library, and allegedly exfiltrated four terabytes of Mercor data — reportedly including tax records, passport scans, interview recordings, and facial biometrics. The hacking group Lapsus$ claimed responsibility and offered the data for sale on Telegram, and a class action was filed against Mercor in California in April. Mercor has maintained that only a very limited subset of sensitive data was affected and that there is no evidence of fraudulent use. Despite the breach, Foody says every major frontier lab expanded its relationship with Mercor afterward — and the company's ARR doubled in the four months following the incident, which is either a remarkable vote of confidence or a reflection of just how few alternatives exist at that scale.