AI has brought the startup world the rise of a new phenomenon: startups that almost instantly hit multimillion-dollar ARR (annual recurring revenue).
Stories abound of founders going from zero to $10 million, or as much as $100 million, in annual recurring revenue in a matter of months.
To be fair, this alone isn’t a harbinger of long-term success. VCs say that durable growth is far more important than ultra-speedy growth. Investors want to back companies where the rate at which customers cancel or stop paying is low, meaning customers are happy. They want that annual or monthly recurring revenue to stick around and grow, not wobble and crash.
Even so, the phenomenon is real. As part of Stripe’s annual report, released on Tuesday, the payments giant revealed that it had more new businesses start using its products in 2025 than ever before, with more than half — specifically 57% — outside the United States. This 2025 cohort grew 50% faster than those who started using Stripe products in 2024, it said. While Stripe did not reveal the hard numbers, it did say that 2025 saw double the number of these fledging startups hit $10 million in ARR within three months compared to the number that did so in 2024.
The letter also noted that Stripe Atlas — the company’s business incorporation tool — saw a 41% increase in company formations last year. Of those new startups, 20% charged their first customer within 30 days, up from just 8% in 2020, further underscoring how quickly this new generation of founders is moving.
In comparison, in 2024, founders were still publicly celebrating hitting $10 million in ARR in three years — which is still, by most business standards, a metric worth boasting about.
So for all of those on social media saying things like, “Bootstrapping to $10M ARR is easier and less risky than creating a VC-backed unicorn, ” or things like, “the AI-native startups hitting $10M ARR with just three people are rewriting the entire playbook,” well, now there’s a smattering of data to back that up.
