Launching the Official Lean AI Leaderboard 🏆
Officially tracking the road to the first "1-Person" Billion Dollar Company
There’s a founder who generates $1B in ARR with just 30 employees. VCs are begging to invest, but he won’t take their money.
No, that is NOT a typo.
He is turning down funding. In 2025.
The Silicon Valley I have known for 10+ years is unrecognizable now.
I spent the last 8 years building a $150M ARR company the traditional way: 200+ employees, raising $200M+ in VC funding, and a constant grind of growth at all costs.
But today, AI has completely changed the traditional startup playbook.
There used to be a time when startups needed hundreds of employees to hit their first $10M ARR. Those days are long gone.
One person can now handle what used to require an entire department, whether it's customer service, marketing, coding, or research.
The economics are so mind-boggling that they sound made up:
• Old world: Burn $1M to generate $1M in revenue
• Today: Generate $1M in revenue on just $200K spend
• Tomorrow: Do it with $100K or less
These new-age lean AI-Native startups are thriving without VC money. They simply don't need it.
I've been following this trend closely for some time now and created the official leaderboard for lean AI-Native companies called the LeanAILeaderboard.com
It's the first comprehensive database tracking every ultra-lean AI-Native company.
Until now, all this information had been scattered across random social media posts, buried in news articles, or shared as industry gossip. No single source of truth existed.
So today, I'm officially launching this open-source website to track our progress toward this new trend of companies that have hyper-scaled without massive headcount or funding rounds.
I've spent weeks collecting verifiable data on companies that meet these criteria:
• Revenue exceeding $5M ARR
• Teams smaller than 50 people
• Founded within the last 5 years
The data will leave you speechless:
• Average revenue per employee: $3.7M (10x the SaaS industry standard)
• Average valuation/employee: $144M (14x the value for tech giants)
• Average team size: 23 (compared to 100+ for normal startups)
There were 5 new companies that stood out on the list and were not extensively covered before:
• Telegram Messenger: $1B ARR => 30 employees
• fal: $40M ARR => 25 employees (full disclosure, i'm an angel investor)
• Cal AI: $12MM ARR => 4 employees
• OpenArt AI: $12MM ARR => 8 employees
• Solvely.ai: $6MM ARR => 4 employees
Looks like Sam Altman wasn't exaggerating when he predicted: "There will soon be a 1-person billion-dollar company."
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If you know a company that belongs on the leaderboard, please tag it or DM me, so we can all help grow this list.
I'm also actively investing in and supporting founders who are building next-gen Lean AI-Native companies. If you're a deep domain/industry expert building in AI (even if non-technical) and want to partner, share this post and let's connect!