Just a few years ago, the idea of one person creating a company worth more than a billion dollars seemed like a pipe dream. Thanks to rapid advances in AI, the possibility of a “solopreneur unicorn” is less a matter of “if” and more of “when.”
Earlier this year, OpenAI founder Sam Altman told Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian that his group chat of tech CEO friends has a betting pool for when the world will see a billion-dollar one-man company. Ten months later, some experts suggest the company could be founded in 2026, if it hasn’t already, thanks to rapid advances in artificial AI.
“A person’s ability to scale themselves, to automate their life, has just become amazing,” said Kyle Jensen, director of entrepreneurship programs, associate professor and professor of the practice of entrepreneurship at the Yale School of Management. “If you are very skilled with these tools, you can achieve the productivity of ten people.”
Jensen adds that solo entrepreneurship has traditionally been more like small business ownership, where people sell goods and services over the Internet.
Although many solopreneurs still fit that mold, he sees a different kind of solopreneur emerging; one that more closely resembles a high-growth startup, using new tools instead of hiring.
“There have been a handful of companies with private market valuations of over a billion dollars and with very small teams – WhatsApp is a very famous example,” he says. “What are the odds that you’ll see a solo entrepreneur who has something like an engineer from Google, who has decided she doesn’t want to do that anymore — and will do her AI startup from home, and become the first unicorn? I think that’s a pretty good chance.”
Unicorns are getting smaller
The first one-person company to cross the billion dollar mark may not seem that far away. In recent years, some sole proprietorships have achieved smaller, but still notable, valuations. At the same time, the record for the smallest unicorn company continues to be broken.
Earlier this year, for example, solopreneur Maor Sholomo sold its AI app building platform Base44 to website builder Wix for $80 million just six months after launch.
Instagram had just 13 employees when it was sold to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. One of those co-founders, Mike Krieger, founded Anthropic in 2021, which recently appreciated at $350 billion. Speaking to Fast Company earlier this year, Krieger suggested that the one-person unicorn is “closer than you think.”
“It feels like we’re getting closer and closer every month,” said Jamie Neuwirth, Anthropic’s Head of Startup Sales. “Companies we work with at Y Combinator that are very small (usually two or three people) get to market faster, and that opportunity for them to become a unicorn is very real.”
A virtual co-founder
In the recent past, solo entrepreneurs could automate certain operations, but this often required a high degree of technical knowledge and many hours of building custom tools.
Now, Neuwirth says AI tools like Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude, can serve as a collaborator and take on more advanced and critical tasks, without requiring founders to have a deep technical background.
“I think of AI – and Claude in particular – as everything from this virtual employee to a kind of chief of staff, but the way I think about it when it comes to solopreneurs is more like your virtual co-founder,” he says. “You can come from a less technical background, but there is still a lot you can achieve with these tools.”
Where can you look for solo unicorns?
In recent months, AI companies like Base 44, Anthropic and Swedish “vibe coding” app Loveable (which lets users build apps and websites by describing them in simple language) have dominated headlines with eye-catching valuations, but Neuwirth says the first one-person unicorn won’t necessarily emerge from the AI field.
That’s because these solutions enable small teams and individuals to build, test, prototype, and ultimately sell technical solutions without deep technical skills.
“As the modeling capabilities get a lot better, I think we’ll see these come from different industries,” he says. “For me it goes back to, ‘Where is the immediate need and is the market really big?’”
One sector that Neuwirth believes is ripe for a first solo unicorn is healthcare, where he says there are many legacy practices and processes, and a huge, global market eager for innovation.
Meanwhile, Tim Cortinovis, speaker and author of The Single-Handed Unicorn, believes the first billion-dollar one-man company will provide an easy interface to a complicated process, or a simple solution to a universal problem.
“If you can create a very easy interface between agents and the tasks to be performed in, say, a heavy machinery industry or the energy sector, I think it will solve a huge problem,” he says. “My advice is: don’t try to make the first unicorn with one hand, but try to solve a big problem. You don’t win the game by thinking about winning.”
The first solo unicorn may already have been born
While it may take a solopreneur founder several years to reach a ten-figure valuation, Cortinovis says 2025 will go down as the year the necessary tools to accomplish such a feat became available.
In other words, it’s possible that the first person to accomplish this feat has already started building their business.
“By 2025, we will reach the capabilities of AI agents to perform these complex tasks and orchestration,” says Cortinovis, explaining that AI broke out of the chatbot box this year and can now work with other tools and apps to perform more complex tasks, such as building apps and websites, managing a marketing campaign or handling more complex customer service queries. “Maybe we’ll see the first results in late ’26 or early ’27 and maybe two years later we’ll get the first real unicorn on the market at that valuation.”
If that one-man company were to emerge, Cortinovis says, the implications would extend far beyond the individual founder.
“I think this opens the way for more people [to pursue entrepreneurship] Because it proves that you don’t need an extensive team, you don’t need to hire people en masse to start a business,” he says.
“It symbolizes a new wave of founders. Even if you’re not looking for a huge valuation, it will make them more willing to start a business because it shows how much easier it is with technology.”
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