Part 1: The $1B dollar single person company

And a first-of-its-kind review of 30 leading AI unicorns

Feb 25, 2025

👋 Hi, it’s Palle Broe and welcome to Rule of Thumb, my weekly newsletter exploring the startup and tech world providing tangible advice and insights from the worlds best operators and startups

There is a lot of hype around the revenue and efficiencies small AI driven startups can achieve. We are seeing companies achieve double-digit million $ ARR with less than 15 people. In a conversation with Alexis Ohanian, Sam Altman famously said that with AI it was only a matter of time before we would see the first company valued at $1B having one person running in.

With the rise of AI agents - we are moving closer to a world where most, if not all, functions can become subscriptions managed by one individual.

This led me to the following question:

Is anybody close to achieving this today?

Definition of a $1B single person company

Before we jump in I think its important to define what would qualify. Sam Altman's definition of a billion-dollar company is based solely on achieving a $1 billion valuation. However, valuation alone can be misleading, as many individuals (Altman, Elon Musk etc.) could secure a billion-dollar valuation based purely on their name.

In my view, substantial revenue is necessary to meaningfully qualify as a billion-dollar company. Specifically, achieving at least double-digit millions in ARR, and ideally a minimum of $50M ARR, which would justify a unicorn valuation based on a 20x revenue multiple.

To be transparent, right now NO companies are close to qualifying using the above definition.

The reason why is fairly obvious: The AI technology isn’t good enough. Autonomous AI agents are far from being sufficiently powerful to fully replace employees.

However, we are seeing very small teams raise huge sums of capital while also generating significant ARR revenue and having very healthy revenue per employee ratios. Midjourney is at $200M ARR without having raised any funding! Cursor is at $100M ARR with less than 30 people and Adept is at $75M with 22 people.

… Read on to learn more about what we uncovered.

Key takeaways

AI startups are achieving staggering ARR growth—Midjourney reached $200M ARR without any venture funding and fewer than 50 employees.
Coding AI tools lead rapid efficiency: Bolt.new, Cursor, and Devin exemplify explosive revenue growth with tiny teams (less than 30).
AI Applications have really strong revenue per employee numbers. Almost 50% of startups boasting numbers above $200K and 3 are above $3M per employee!
B2C AI startups require less employees to scale than B2B startups: Consumer-focused AI companies with a self-serve motion require fewer employees vs B2B focused startups which need more people for GTM functions.
Funding dynamics are shifting: Some AI unicorns raise over $10M per employee, with the average being around $3.5M - significantly more than non-AI companies.
AI valuations explode with lean teams: Valuations per employee exceed $200M at Midjourney and just short of $20M per employee highlighting unprecedented efficiency and potential in AI-driven businesses.
Could one person build a $1B AI company? Sam Altman believes it's inevitable—AI agents are bringing this vision closer to reality but we are still a way out from seeing a one person $1B company.

Methodology

Sources: Public available sources, Harmonic, and Crunchbase.
The top 30 unicorns selected in this deep-dive were chosen by the author. Focused on the application layer and unicorns (although a few fall just short of this definition).
Data is as of February 20, 2025 (or otherwise, as stated on the graphs).
Valuation and revenue data taken from various online public sources. Treat the numbers below as directional, not as exact figures.

Top 30 AI unicorns with the fewest employees

As it is clearly visible on the graph below no company meets the 1 person requirement. The unicorn with the lowest number of employees is Safe Superintelligence created by Ilya Sutskever at 10 employees but as argued they are pre-revenue and does not meet the criteria around significant ARR.

The most impressive company is Midjourney who have shown that it is possible to scale an AI company to more than $200M ARR without receiving venture funding and doing it with less than 50 people.

We are also seeing the “coding AI” apps are able to scale revenue very quickly with few number of employees: StackBlitz (Bolt.new), Anysphere (Cursor) and Cognition AI (Devin) are all examples of this trend. Also worth noting that 5/7 of the companies with fewest employees are B2C companies which makes sense as B2B often requires more people to scale revenue (GTM, Sales, Implementation etc.).

AI unicorns with the most revenue

Clearly AI companies are now generating significant revenue - particularly the AI applications. Many startups are posting double-digit revenue and growth. 50% of the companies on this list have reported revenues north of $50M ARR. In the LLM layer OpenAI and Anthropic have both crossed the $1B milestone and does not seem to be losing steam.

Revenue per employee

Revenue per employee is an important metric to evaluate the quality of the business. As per Jason Lemkin a good revenue per employee number should be around $250-300K. That is what companies like Zoom and Samsara had at the time of their IPOs. 14 out of 30 companies have revenue per employee of more than $200K with Midjourney, Anysphere (Cursor) and Adept all having revenue per employee of more than $3M which is truly outstanding!

To compare the revenue per employee I have added in the equivalent data for MAG 7 companies for the full year of 2024. Impressive to see that AI startups are already surpassing many of the largest tech companies and this trend is likely to only continue.

Funding per employee

Interestingly we see a huge range in the amounts raised on a per employee basis. Some companies such as Adept and Anthropic have raised +$10M per employee while others have raised less than $500K per employee such as Elise AI and Clay. As one would expect the funding towards leading AI companies have been plentiful often resulting in oversubscribed rounds. As competition is heating up in many categories startups are bolstering their war chests to be the one that comes out on top.

Valuation per employee

The valuation per employee is a bit of a vanity metric on its own as its almost solely focused on future potential. However one thing that is clear from the list below is that no company is close to having a $1B valuation (while also having meaningful revenue). The most impressive company is Midjourney which have a $204M valuation per employee without raising capital.

So to answer the question: Is anybody close to achieving a $1B one person company today?

While the vision of a one-person, billion-dollar AI company remains compelling, we're not quite there yet. Today's most impressive AI startups—like Midjourney, Cursor, and Adept—demonstrate extraordinary efficiency, reaching hundreds of millions in ARR with incredibly lean teams. Revenue-per-employee figures are off the charts, surpassing even established tech giants. Yet, true autonomy in AI isn't developed enough to completely eliminate human involvement. For now, the billion-dollar, single-person AI company remains aspirational.

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