The Solo Founders of AI
It’s a lonely and hyper-productive world.
by Ceren A. Desnos
It has been a year since the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, dropped the bomb during the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now it will happen.”
We still don’t have our winner. That one founder who reached a billion-dollar valuation without hiring a single employee. That one person unicorn, or shall we call it a “solo-corn”?
It has become an undeniable fact, however that AI has transformed how we build tech businesses. From scratch to a billion, maybe all by ourselves, in our pajamas even.
From Unicorns to Solo-Corns
As Replit CEO Amjad Masad put it, “we are now officially living in an era where anyone can build an app in an afternoon, with AI empowering a new wave of solo startups”.
That intuition is echoed by Tim Cortinovis, the author of Single-Handed Unicorn: How to Solo Build a Billion-Dollar Company, who suggests in an interview that the AI revolution has radically simplified what it takes to build a tech company. Accordingly, all you really need is YOU, provided you have the right problem to solve and the right mix of AI tools and freelancers.
The shift from ‘there is an app for that!’ towards ‘there is an AI tool for that’
It is true that AI acceleration is democratising founder access to the tech sector. Building a tech company no longer requires being a former employee of a Silicon Valley giant, surrounded by a ready-made network of engineers, early investors, and accelerators.
This may be the reason behind the wave of Cinderella stories in tech. Except that Cinderella is a founder, the stepsisters are sitting on VC boards, the fairy is an AI agent and Cinderella can’t make it to the party. She has a company to run.
The Case Studies That Broke the Timeline
The story of ElevenLabs illustrates this shift. Founded in 2022 in Warsaw by two friends, Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, out of frustration with the poor quality of dubbing in Poland, ElevenLabs became one of the fastest-growing and most commercially successful AI voice-generation companies today, reaching a valuation of over $1 billion within just two years of launch.
But it’s not only about leveling the playing field, the power dynamics in the tech ecosystem have shifted.
Back in the day, building a tech product required a long and expensive runway. Development cycles stretched over months or years, hiring teams early was almost unavoidable and infrastructure costs were high. You almost needed an investment to get an investment! And once the funding was secured, the logic was clear: hire an army of talent, scale fast. Profitability was tomorrow’s problem.
It looks like today, the old playbook, old like only a couple of years back, has been fundamentally disrupted. By using AI efficiencies, the new generation AI companies are developing AI products to generate, well… yet more efficiencies. And thanks to this self-reinforcing loop, businesses are built with far less people, much faster, at far lower cost and they reach mind-blowing recurring revenues in a matter of months, if not weeks.
The story of Lovable is a great example. Founded in Sweden in 2024, Lovable is part of the first wave of AI-native coding platforms designed to drastically reduce the time and cost of building software not only for professionals but for individuals. Forbes reports that less than a year after launch, the company reportedly surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. It then tripled its value to $6.6 billion in less than six months, making it the fastest growing software startup in history, and its founders Europe’s youngest self-made billionaires.
Reuters also reports that AI video generation startup Higgsfield scaled to around $10 million in ARR from zero in a matter of weeks, to then reach $200 million in annualized revenue and a valuation of $1.3 billion within just over a year.
Strikingly, the combined workforce behind these global multi-million-dollar companies likely does not exceed 100 employees.
When Money Starts Whispering
Money talks!.. More quietly now.
It is therefore not surprising that tech startups no longer seem to require early-stage funding in the way they once did. A telling example comes from Gamma, an AI startup founded by Grant Lee. In an interview with The New York Times, Lee described how he constantly hears from investors who try to persuade him to take their money – money he does not need- and that some have even sent him and his co-founders personalised gift baskets.
What would once have sounded like a founder’s fantasy – politely declining capital while investors compete for attention- is increasingly becoming reality for AI-native companies with strong unit economics. But shall we really be worried for the future of venture capital firms companies?
Solo-Corns, Defined
The move toward “solo-corns” no longer appears like a radical idea. To be clear, when I use the term “solo-corn,” I am not describing a personality type or a heroic founder myth. I am describing a structural condition. A solo-corn is a one-person company that reaches unicorn-level impact.
Solo-corns were not viable a decade ago. The cost of engineering, design, distribution, and operations made them impractical. Today, those constraints have loosened. The remaining question is which parts of a company require human presence at all.
Canva and the Long Prelude
Canva is one of the biggest success stories that started off with a solo founder solving a personal problem with burning determination. In 2013 in Australia by Melanie Perkins, Canva was born from her frustration while teaching design software at university and witnessing how complex existing tools like Photoshop were.
Perkins spent years pitching Canva to investors and was repeatedly rejected, likely in part because she was a young woman under 30, from outside the U.S. tech ecosystem trying to solve a problem many investors underestimated. She explains in a video how the investors thought her market was not big enough. History proved otherwise. The market turned out to be almost every adult around the world, but we were simply not living in that reality yet.
Today, Canva is almost a household name with a $42 billion valuation. By embedding design expertise directly into the software, it offers affordable and efficient visual creation tools to individuals and companies worldwide.
Canva did not produce a solo-corn, a term I am still test-driving, but it quietly helped shape the future for today’s AI-native moment, making the one-person company structurally plausible.
Where Are We Headed Then? Heaven or Hell?
Some may find this direction toward the one-person unicorn alarming, while others see it as an aspiration. Either way, it is undeniably a signal. A signal emerging from a sector like tech, where efficiency has always mattered, and where AI is now pushing those dynamics to their limits and beyond.
On the one hand, this evolution expands access. It lowers entry barriers, reduces dependence on elite networks and capital, and allows individuals to build viable companies on their own terms. For many entrepreneurs, this is a genuine redistribution of opportunity.
On the other hand, efficiency comes with trade-offs. Creatives and skilled professionals worry that their expertise is increasingly absorbed into tools. Tasks that once required collaboration, dialogue, and human judgment are streamlined or automated and employment opportunities thin out. Who, then, will buy these products if everyone ends up unemployed?
A Familiar Pattern, Repeating
We all have opinions, but it is almost impossible to find a definitive answer. We are only human after all. And yet, we have lived through similar shifts before.
Not so long ago, appearing on television required being an anchorperson, backed by a newsroom, a channel, and institutional legitimacy. Social media has its flaws and its share of negative effects on society, but it also disrupted that model, radically lowering the barrier to visibility. Today, almost anyone can broadcast, comment, or build an audience, in short, have a voice.
What if we are stepping into a world where building a tech company becomes accessible to many more people?
Maybe we are evolving into a world built around ideas rather than expertise, maybe the opportunities are still there but the access codes are changing, and maybe, just maybe, it is not entirely a bad thing.
