How close is the first solopreneur unicorn?
Just a handful of years ago, the idea of one person creating a company worth over a billion dollars seemed like a pipe dream. Thanks to rapid advancements in AI, the possibility of a “solopreneur unicorn” is less a matter of “if” and more a matter of “when.”
Earlier this year, OpenAI founder Sam Altman told Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian that his group chat of tech CEO friends have a betting pool for when the world will see a one-person billion-dollar company. Ten months later, some experts suggest that the company could be founded in 2026, if it hasn’t been already, due to rapid advancements in agentic AI.
“The ability of a person to scale themselves, to automate their lives, has just become amazing,” says Kyle Jensen, the director of entrepreneurship programs, associate dean and professor in the practice of entrepreneurship at Yale School of Management. “If you’re very skilled with those tools, you can have the productivity of 10 people.”
Jensen adds that solopreneurship has historically been more akin to mom-and-pop-style small business ownership, with practitioners selling goods and services through the internet.
While many solopreneurs still fit that mold, he sees another kind of solopreneur emerging; one that better resembles a high-growth startup, using new tools in lieu of hiring.
“There have been a handful of companies that had private market valuations in excess of a billion dollars with very small teams—WhatsApp is a very famous example,” he says. “What is the probability that you’ll see a solo-entrepreneur who’s like, some engineer from Google, who decided she doesn’t want to do that anymore—and she’s going to do her AI startup from home, and become the first unicorn? I think it’s a pretty decent probability.”
Unicorns are shrinking
The first one-person company to surpass a billion dollars may not be all that far off. In recent years some one-person businesses have achieved smaller, yet still eye-popping valuations. At the same time the record for smallest unicorn company keeps getting broken.
Earlier this year, for example, solopreneur Maor Sholomo sold his AI app-building platform Base44 to website builder Wix for $80 million, just six months after launch.
Instagram had only 13 employees when it was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012. One of those cofounders, Mike Krieger, went on to found Anthropic in 2021, which was recently valued at $350 billion. Speaking with Fast Company earlier this year, Krieger suggested the one-person unicorn is “closer than you think.”
“It feels like every month we’re getting closer and closer,” says Anthropic’s Head of Startup Sales, Jamie Neuwirth. “Companies that we’re working with, for example, at Y Combinator who are very small—usually two or three people—they’re getting to market faster, and that opportunity for them to become a unicorn is very real.”
A virtual cofounder
In the recent past, solopreneurs were able to automate certain operations, but it often required a high degree of technical know-how and many hours of building custom tools.
Now, Neuwirth says AI tools like Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude can serve as a collaborator, taking 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 collaborator to a kind of the chief of staff, but the way I think about it when it comes to solopreneurs is more of your virtual cofounder,” he says. “You can have a less technical background, and there’s still a lot that can be achieved with these tools.”
Where to 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 it in plain language–have dominated the headlines with eye-popping valuations, but Neuwirth says the first one-person unicorn won’t necessarily emerge from the AI field.
That’s because those very solutions are allowing small teams and individuals to build, test, prototype, and ultimately sell technical solutions without deep technical skills.
“As the model capabilities get a lot better, I think we’re going to see it come from different industries,” he says. “To me, it goes back to, ‘where is the need immediate, and the market really big?’”
One sector Neuwirth believes is ripe for a first solo-unicorn is healthcare, where he says there are lots of legacy practices and processes, and a massive, global market eager for innovation.
Tim Cortinovis, speaker and author of The Single-Handed Unicorn, meanwhile, believes the first one-person billion-dollar company will offer an easy interface to a complicated process, or a simple solution to a universal problem.
“If you are able to put in a very easy interface between agents and the tasks at hand in, let’s say, a heavy machinery industry or the energy sector, I think this will solve a massive problem,” he says. “My advice is, don’t try to create the first single-handed unicorn, but try to solve a huge problem. You won’t win the game by thinking about winning.”
The first solo unicorn may have already been born
Though it may take that solopreneur founder several years to reach a 10-figure valuation, Cortinovis says 2025 will go down as the year that the necessary tools to accomplish such a feat became available.
In other words, it is possible that the first individual who will accomplish that feat has already begun building their business.
“In 2025 we reached the capacities of AI agents to accomplish these complicated tasks and orchestration,” Cortinovis says, explaining that this year AI broke out of the chatbot box and is now able to work with other tools and apps to complete more complicated tasks, like build apps and websites, manage a marketing campaign, or handle more complicated customer service inquiries. “Maybe we will see the first results at the end of ’26 or at the beginning of ’27 and then maybe two years later we’ll get the first real single-handed unicorn on the market with that valuation.”
Whenever that one-person company does emerge, Cortinovis says the implications would extend well beyond the individual founder.
“I think it opens up the path for more people [to pursue entrepreneurship] because it proves you don’t need an extensive team, you don’t need to start hiring massively to start an enterprise,” he says.
“It symbolizes a new wave of founders. Even if you’re not going after a massive valuation, it will make them more willing to found an enterprise, because it shows how much easier it is with the technology.”
