63% of New Startups Now Have One Founder. The Top Tenth Are Making 61 Times What the Median Does.
Stripe published a number this year that every first-time founder should sit with. Of all the C corporations formed through Stripe Atlas in the second quarter of 2026, 63% had a single founder. That is an all-time high.
The headline is the easy part. The harder part is what happened to the companies those solo founders built.
Among solo-founded Atlas startups, median revenue in the first six months fell 23% year over year in 2025. Revenue at the top decile rose 19%. Four years ago, a top-decile solo founder made about 34 times what the median solo founder made in the first six months. In 2025 that gap was 61 times.
More people are starting companies alone. A few of them are doing far better than ever. Most of them are doing worse. If you are about to start something, the useful question is what the top tenth did differently in the first months, because that is the part you can still choose.
Why there are so many more of them
AI tools have made it possible for one person to build, ship, support customers and iterate. Stripe's own framing is exactly that. The number of solopreneurs earning more than $100,000 a year has risen by a third since 2022.
Stripe's data counts companies at incorporation. A separate report built on Carta's cap-table data, which sees companies later, once they issue equity and raise money, puts the solo-founded share of new U.S. startups at over a third, up 53% since 2019. Different moments in a company's life, same direction. Many founders incorporate alone and decide about a co-founder later.
What that means in practice is that the bar to start has dropped and the bar to matter has not. A lower barrier lets in more companies, and more companies means a longer tail of ones that never find customers. That is the 23% drop at the median.
What the top decile did in the first months
Stripe studied thousands of solo-founded Atlas startups incorporated in 2022 and 2023, each with at least two years of revenue, and compared the top decile with the middle. Four patterns stood out, and all of them are decisions you make before you have much of a company.
They built products where AI is the core, not a feature. Top-decile solo founders were about twice as likely to be building AI-native products. By month 24, AI-native solo startups made almost twice the revenue of the others. Stripe expected a few outliers to explain that. They didn't: revenue at the 99th percentile was nearly identical. The advantage showed up across the broad middle, from roughly the 50th to the 95th percentile.
They sold to businesses. The top decile was nearly 30% more likely to be B2B. By month 24, the median solo B2B founder earned more than four times the median solo B2C founder. This was not just a funding effect. It held for bootstrapped companies too.
They sold globally from the first month. Top-decile founders sold into an average of 10 countries in their first month, against three for the median. By month 24 it was 40 non-U.S. countries against six. International revenue was 51% of the total for the top decile and 2% for the median.
They kept their first customers. Nearly 30% of first-month customers came back the next month at top-decile startups, against 8% in the middle. By the start of year two, those first-month customers were spending 47% more than when they started, about twice the expansion seen at median startups. Among B2B solo founders, the top decile retained first-month customers at six times the median rate. They were also 20 to 26 percentage points more likely to bill on a recurring model.
The retention number is the one to watch
Of those four, the last is the most useful at the very beginning, because it shows up in weeks rather than years.
Month-two retention is the earliest honest signal a startup gets. Revenue in month one can come from friends, a launch post or a curious audience. Whether those same people pay again in month two tells you whether you solved a problem or just got attention. A 30% return rate and an 8% return rate are both small numbers, and the difference between them decides whether the company compounds.
This is also why recurring billing matters. It does not create retention, but it makes it visible from the start. A founder who sells one-off licences or lifetime deals cannot see month two at all.
Where solo founding runs out of road
Stripe's data has an honest finding for solo founders too. Early on, solo-founded startups out-earned teams. By month 24 that flipped: top-decile multi-founder startups were making 53% more than top-decile solo founders, even after accounting for investor funding.
The gap nearly disappears at the extreme. Among the best bootstrapped companies, the 99th percentile, solo and multi-founder revenue after two years differed by only 5%. But that is the very top. For most companies a second founder still helps, and the time it helps most is the second year, when the work stops being one person's to do.
So solo is a fine way to start. It is a risky way to stay, unless you are deliberate about adding judgement around you through early hires, advisors and other founders.
What to do if you are starting alone this month
Pick a business buyer. The B2B advantage held at every level Stripe measured, including bootstrapped companies. If you have a choice between a consumer idea and a business idea of similar appeal, the data says take the business one.
Charge in month one, on a subscription. You need the month-two number, and you cannot see it without recurring billing.
Don't wall off the rest of the world. Payments, tax and localization are far easier than they were. A product that sells in English to businesses can usually sell in ten countries as easily as in one.
Watch month-two retention before anything else. Not signups, not launch traffic, not first-month revenue. If fewer than one in ten first customers come back, go talk to the nine who didn't before you build anything new. Our course lesson on validating before you build walks through those conversations.
Decide about a co-founder by month twelve, not month twenty-four. The multi-founder advantage shows up in year two. If you are going to add a partner, the time to find one is before you need one. The course lesson on the small team covers how to choose one and how to split equity.
The honest version
Starting alone has never been easier, and Stripe's numbers prove that it can work. They also show that the typical solo company in 2025 did worse than the typical one the year before, because more people started companies that nobody needed.
The difference between the top tenth and the middle was not talent or luck. It was a small number of early choices: who you sell to, where you sell, how you bill, and whether you notice in month two that your first customers are leaving.
Sources
- Stripe, Solo founding is at an all-time high: Top performers have these traits in common, 2026
- Solo Founders, Solo founders are 63% of new startups in 2026 (Stripe), 2026
