The startup world is witnessing a new phenomenon driven by AI: companies achieving multimillion-dollar annual recurring revenue almost instantly. Stories abound of founders going from zero to ten million, or even one hundred million, in annual recurring revenue in just months.
It is important to note that this rapid growth alone is not a guarantee of long-term success. Venture capitalists emphasize that durable growth is far more important than ultra-speedy growth. Investors seek to back companies where customer churn is low, indicating happy customers. They want that recurring revenue to stick around and expand steadily, not wobble and crash.
Even so, the phenomenon is real. Stripe’s annual report, released recently, revealed that more new businesses started using its products in 2025 than ever before, with over half located outside the United States. This 2025 cohort grew fifty percent faster than those who started using Stripe in 2024. While Stripe did not reveal specific figures, it stated that double the number of these fledgling startups hit ten million dollars in annual recurring revenue within three months compared to 2024.
The report also noted that Stripe Atlas, the company’s business incorporation tool, saw a forty-one percent increase in company formations last year. Of those new startups, twenty percent charged their first customer within thirty days, up from just eight percent in 2020. This further underscores the accelerated pace of this new generation of founders.
For context, in 2024 founders were still publicly celebrating the achievement of ten million dollars in annual recurring revenue over three years—a milestone that, by most business standards, remains impressive.
So for all those voices on social media claiming that bootstrapping to ten million in annual recurring revenue is easier and less risky than building a venture-backed unicorn, or that AI-native startups hitting that revenue with just three people are rewriting the entire playbook, there is now a smattering of data to back up such assertions.