Summary
Solo founders used to be the exception among high-potential startups, and investors treated them with caution. Since 2022 their share of new companies has grown, and early studies suggest that generative AI lets one person cover work that used to need a team. On the other hand, the first evidence on outcomes still favours teams. The honest position today is that the old rule is under question and the new one is not yet proven.
What a solo founder is
A solo founder is a person who starts a venture without a co-founder. One person holds the founding role and the founding equity. Being solo describes how the company was founded, not how it operates: a solo founder can hire employees, work with contractors and advisors, and raise capital.
A solo founder is not the same as a solopreneur. The solo founder is building a company that is meant to grow beyond the founder. The solopreneur builds a business around their own work and usually wants it to stay small. Most public data mixes the two, so the first question to ask of any statistic is who was counted.
I use a narrower term for the founders I study, the Gen AI solo founder, defined on its own page.
How common solo founders are
Figure 1. Solo-founded startups today
of new US startups in the first half of 2025 had a solo founder, up from 23.7% in 2019.
Source: Carta, Solo Founders Report (2025)
Figure 2. The picture before Gen AI
of the high-potential startups in Wasserman's dataset were solo-founded.
Source: Wasserman (2012)
Before generative AI, solo founding was unusual among ambitious startups. In Wasserman's (2012) dataset of high-potential startups, only 16.1% were solo-founded.
More recent data points in a different direction. According to Carta (2025), the share of new US startups with a solo founder rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025.
These two sources are not directly comparable. Wasserman studied high-potential technology and life sciences startups, while Carta reports on the companies that use its platform. However, both describe the same population investors care about: companies set up to raise capital and grow. All of this data is from the United States. The section on Europe explains what that means for European investors.
Why investors have treated solo founders as a red flag
The caution has clear reasons, and most of them are about capacity:
- Missing skills. One person rarely covers technology, product, sales and finance.
- Workload. Building a company is more than one person can do in the hours available.
- Key-person risk. If the founder burns out, gets sick or leaves, the company stops.
- No challenge. Without a partner, weak decisions go unquestioned.
- The signal. If the founder could not convince anyone to join, will they convince customers and employees?
The concern is old. Stinchcombe (1965, as cited in Wasserman, 2012) argued that much of what makes young firms fragile lies inside the founding team: people need to build working relationships, find their roles and split the rewards.
Founding teams carry their own risk
Figure 3. Teams are a risk too
of failures in their portfolio companies were attributed by venture capitalists, in one survey, to problems within the management team.
Source: Gorman & Sahlman (1989), as cited in Wasserman (2012)
The same argument cuts the other way. Wasserman (2012) reports a survey in which venture capitalists attributed 65% of the failures in their portfolio companies to problems within the management team (Gorman & Sahlman, 1989, as cited in Wasserman, 2012).
This figure is often repeated as "65% of startups fail because of co-founder conflict". That is not what the source says. It refers to management-team problems in venture-backed companies, as judged by their investors, in a survey from 1989. It still makes the point that a team reduces some risks and adds others, mainly disagreements about vision, control and equity.
What generative AI changed
Two studies give the first evidence on what happened after the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
Cai et al. (2025) analysed more than 12 million new firm registrations in China. They found a sharp rise in firm creation in areas with stronger AI skills, driven by small firms. The new firms had less capital, fewer shareholders and smaller founding teams, and the effect was strongest among first-time entrepreneurs. The authors describe generative AI as acting like a "co-founder". The study is a preprint and has not yet been peer reviewed.
Dell'Acqua et al. (2025) ran a field experiment with 776 professionals at Procter & Gamble. Individuals working with AI matched the performance of two-person teams working without it, and produced more balanced solutions regardless of their professional background. This is a working paper about product development inside a large company, not about startups. However, it tests the mechanism that matters here: whether one person with AI can do work that used to need a team.
My reading is that AI does not replace a co-founder. It takes over part of the tasks of several roles, and the founder covers what AI cannot do with paid specialists. The capacity argument against solo founders is weaker than it was. The human side of the argument has not changed.
The evidence against
Not everything points in favour of solo founders. Kim and Kang (2026) analysed more than 160,000 product launches on Product Hunt after the release of ChatGPT. Launches by solo entrepreneurs increased sharply. However, team-based ventures continued to dominate the top of the rankings, and solo launches showed lower engagement after launch.
This result deserves attention, and it has limits. It measures products, not companies. A successful company can have several failed products, and a popular launch does not guarantee revenue, funding or survival. A sample of launches also mixes side projects with founders who are building a company. The study shows that more people are launching alone. It does not yet tell us how solo-founded companies perform.
Solo founders in Europe
Every figure on this page comes from the United States or China. I have not found a public dataset that reports how many European startups have a solo founder, or how European investors and programmes treat them.
This matters because the two markets are not the same. Funding rounds, exit routes, public support programmes and the role of universities and accelerators differ between Europe and the United States. A rule copied from Silicon Valley, for or against solo founders, has not been tested in Europe.
For now, European investors have to read the evidence above as a direction and not as a measurement of their own market. Collecting European evidence is the purpose of my research. If your fund, accelerator or incubator has data on solo founders in its own pipeline, I would like to hear from you.
What is still unknown
- Whether solo-founded companies created after 2022 survive and grow at different rates from team-founded ones.
- How investors, accelerators and incubators evaluate solo founders today.
- What solo founders themselves are aiming for, and whether it matches what investors expect.
- How many European startups are solo-founded, and whether the trend seen in the United States holds in Europe.
These questions are part of my research.
Common questions
What is a solo founder?
A solo founder is a person who starts a venture without a co-founder: one person holds the founding role and the founding equity. A solo founder can still hire employees, work with contractors and raise capital.
What is the difference between a solo founder and a solopreneur?
A solo founder is building a company that is meant to grow beyond the founder. A solopreneur builds a business around their own work, such as consulting or freelancing, and usually wants it to stay small. The two are often mixed in data and in the press, which makes many claims about solo founders hard to interpret.
How many startups have a solo founder?
In Carta's data on US startups, 36.3% of the companies founded in the first half of 2025 had a solo founder, compared with 23.7% in 2019 (Carta, 2025). In Wasserman's (2012) dataset of high-potential startups, collected before generative AI, 16.1% were solo-founded. The two sources use different samples, so the numbers describe a direction and are not a like-for-like comparison.
Why have investors been cautious about solo founders?
The usual reasons are about capacity and risk: one person rarely has all the skills, the workload is high, the company depends on a single person, and nobody challenges the founder's decisions. Some investors also read it as a signal that the founder could not convince anyone to join.
Is there data on solo founders in Europe?
Very little. The figures most often quoted come from Carta's data on US startups, and the first academic studies after generative AI use data from China and from a global product platform. I have not found a public dataset on the share of solo-founded startups in Europe. European investors should read the existing evidence as a direction, not as a measurement of their own market.
Can AI replace a co-founder?
The evidence so far supports a narrower claim. Generative AI can take over many tasks that co-founders used to cover, and the founder can cover the rest with paid specialists. It does not replace a person: judgement built on experience, accountability and emotional support are not tasks an AI model takes over.
Do teams still perform better than solo founders?
Some evidence says yes. In a study of more than 160,000 product launches after the release of ChatGPT, team-based ventures continued to dominate the top rankings (Kim & Kang, 2026). That study measures the popularity of products at launch, not the survival, revenue or funding of companies, so the question is still open at company level.
References
- Cai, J. J., Gu, X., Sheng, L., Xia, M., Zhao, L., & Zhu, W. (2025). AI as "co-founder": GenAI for entrepreneurship (arXiv:2512.06506). arXiv. Preprint, not yet peer reviewed. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.06506
- Carta. (2025). Solo founders report. https://carta.com/data/solo-founders-report
- Dell'Acqua, F., Ayoubi, C., Lifshitz-Assaf, H., Sadun, R., Mollick, E. R., Mollick, L., Han, Y., Goldman, J., Nair, H., Taub, S., & Lakhani, K. R. (2025). The cybernetic teammate: A field experiment on generative AI reshaping teamwork and expertise [Working paper].
- Kim, H., & Kang, H. (2026). Generative AI expands solo entrepreneurial entry, yet team advantage persists (extended abstract). Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series, 9(1), 215–216. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaaiss.v9i1.42928
- Wasserman, N. (2012). The founder's dilemmas: Anticipating and avoiding the pitfalls that can sink a startup. Princeton University Press.