Solo founders and AI drive startups with minimal teams
2–3 minutes
The rise of solo founders
A report by Carta, a share management platform, shows that 36% of startups created on the platform in 2025 had a single founder, compared to 31% in 2024.
Stripe data shows that solo founders accounted for 63% of new companies opened by Stripe Atlas in the second quarter of 2026. The datasets are not directly comparable: Stripe tracks the time of registration, while Carta analyzes companies that already have a capital structure.
How small teams sustain billion-dollar businesses
AI agents replace departments
AI agents are programs that perform tasks in sequence with minimal human supervision. According to Carta’s report analysis, tasks that previously required hiring can now be performed by a single founder with the right tools:
- product development
- marketing
- customer service
- operations
A notable example is Base44, an app creation platform. Founder Maor Shlomo built the company alone and sold it to Wix for US$ 80 million, six months after its launch.
Lean companies with high revenue
Research by Sacra shows that Midjourney, a company specializing in AI-generated images, reached US$ 500 million in annual recurring revenue with around 107 employees.
In February 2026, TechCrunch reported that Cursor, an AI-powered code editor, surpassed US$ 2 billion in annualized revenue. Estimates of Cursor’s team size range from 50 to 300 people.
The limits of the solo model
Despite this growth, Carta data shows that startups led by solo founders accounted for about 30% of companies created in 2024, but received only 14.7% of the capital raised in priced investment rounds, indicating that financing still favors larger teams.
The first hire by a solo founder occurs, on average, 399 days after the company is founded, a shorter period than that observed in startups with more than one founder.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said 2026 is likely to be the year a billion-dollar company with a single employee emerges, with a 70% to 80% chance. Sam Altman of OpenAI also predicted this scenario. Analysts consider the direction correct, but not yet confirmed in practice.
What the data reveals so far
The figures show the rise of solo founders and companies with high revenue per employee, but these are distinct phenomena. Midjourney and Cursor maintain small teams, not composed of a single person. Stripe’s data analysis describes the most common profile of solo startups: AI-based, business-oriented, global from the start, and with recurring revenue.
