This is the first installment of a new, separate series from our “New CEOs to Watch” continent coverage — this one specifically for startup founders and emerging personalities who haven’t yet built the kind of institutional recognition a Fortune 500 appointment carries, but whose work already deserves it. We’re starting with North America.
Brendan Foody — Mercor
Foody co-founded Mercor, an AI-powered recruiting and talent platform, after stepping away from Georgetown University in 2022 to pursue it full-time. The company’s growth has been genuinely unusual even by AI-era startup standards — reported to have scaled from roughly $1 million to $100 million in annualized revenue run rate in around 11 months, and reaching a valuation near $10 billion within a few years of founding, making Foody and his co-founders among the youngest self-made billionaires in tech.
Before Mercor, Foody had already started multiple ventures — Seros, focused on centralizing personal computing access to improve price-performance in lower-income countries, and Stealth, a cloud consulting business — meaning Mercor wasn’t a first attempt that happened to work, but the product of someone who had already been building and iterating for years by the time it landed.
Why he made this list: Mercor’s growth curve is specific and checkable, not just a valuation headline, and it’s built on a genuinely repeatable pattern from Foody — multiple ventures before the one that scaled, not a single lucky break.
Luana Lopes Lara — Kalshi
Lopes Lara co-founded Kalshi, a regulated prediction-market platform, with Tarek Mansour, and was named by Forbes in December 2025 as the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire — surpassing figures like Scale AI’s Lucy Guo. Born in Brazil to an electrical engineer father and a mathematics-teacher mother, she trained for years as a competitive ballerina at Brazil’s Bolshoi Theater School before studying computer science at MIT and eventually building Kalshi.
What makes her story specifically instructive rather than just a good headline is the category she chose: regulated prediction markets sit at a genuinely difficult intersection of finance, technology, and active regulatory scrutiny — not a category a founder stumbles into without deliberately choosing to fight through real compliance and legal complexity most consumer startups never have to touch.
Why she made this list: building a real company in a heavily regulated financial category, from a non-traditional entry point (ballet, not a typical fintech pedigree), is a genuinely different and harder path than the standard startup story — worth recognizing specifically for that.
Next in this series
Europe and Asia are next, including a founder whose company grew out of frustration with Polish movie dubbing, and India’s youngest CEO of a newly public company.
