01/05/2026
The Billion-Dollar, One-Person Business
Caglar and Lapp are part of a growing chorus of experts predicting the dawn of the billion-dollar, one-person business. The 2025 Solo Founders Report determined that, among Carta’s database of thousands of U.S. companies, the share of startups with solo founders rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025. The Solo Founders Report was created by Carta, maker of an enterprise resource planning system for private capital, and Solo Founders, a San Francisco-based residency program that supports solo entrepreneurs in growing their companies and raising funds.
Although solo founders accounted for only 14.7% of cash raised in the first six months of 2025, their share of venture capital is growing, as startups such as Polymarket, Vercel and Wander validate the single-founder approach, the Solo Founders Report says. However, many of these one-person startups don’t remain solopreneur companies, the report noted: Solo founders hired their first employee at a median of 399 days, compared to 480 for multi-founder companies.
In a separate initiative, Henry Shi, a co-founder and board member of the money-saving site Super.com, maintains the Top 10 AI-Native Leaderboard, documenting the race to create a one-person billion-dollar company. Currently, Telegram, the Dubai-based messaging startup, is in the lead but has several dozen employees.
