More startups reach $10 million ARR in three months than ever before | TechCrunch

AI has given the startup world the emergence of a new phenomenon: startups reaching millions of ARR (annual recurring revenue) almost instantly.

There are countless stories of founders going from zero to $10 million, or even $100 million, in annual recurring revenue in a matter of months.

Frankly, this in itself is not a harbinger of long-term success. VCs say sustainable growth is much more important than ultra-fast growth. Investors want to back companies where the rate at which customers cancel or stop paying is low, meaning customers are satisfied. They want annual or monthly recurring revenue to persist and grow, not falter and crash.

Yet the phenomenon is real. As part of Stripe’s annual report, issued On Tuesday, the payments giant revealed that more new companies will use its products in 2025 than ever before, with more than half – specifically 57% – outside the United States. This 2025 cohort grew 50% faster than those who started using Stripe products in 2024, the report said. While Stripe didn’t reveal the hard numbers, it did say that in 2025, the number of these young startups saw double the ARR value of $10 million within three months, compared to the number that did in 2024.

The letter also noted that Stripe Atlas – the company’s business formation tool – saw a 41% increase in business formations last year. Of these new startups, 20% charged their first customer within 30 days, up from just 8% in 2020, underscoring how quickly this new generation of founders is evolving.

For comparison, the founders were still active in 2024 celebrate publicly reaching $10 million in ARR within three years – which is still a metric worth bragging about by most business standards.

So for everyone on social media saying things like “Starting to $10M ARR is easier and less risky than creating a VC-backed unicorn,” or things like, “The AI-native startups that hit $10 million ARR with just three people are rewriting the entire playbook,” well, now there’s some data to back that up.