More startups are hitting $10M ARR in three months than ever before

AI has brought the startup world the rise of a new phenomenon: startups that almost instantly hit millions of ARR (annual recurring revenue).

Many stories of founders from zero to $10 million, or even up to $100 million, in recurring revenue in a few months.

To be sure, this, by itself, is not indicative of long-term success. VCs do constant growth It is more important than rapid growth. Marketers want to reward companies whose customer abandonment rates are low, meaning that customers are happy. They want the annual or monthly income to be stable and grow, not to fluctuate and deteriorate.

Even so, the phenomenon is real. As part of Stripe’s annual report, release On Tuesday, the payments giant revealed that more new businesses will start using its products in 2025 than ever before, with more than half – and 57% – outside the United States. This 2025 cohort grew 50% faster than those who started using Stripe products in 2024, it said. Although Stripe didn’t reveal hard numbers, it said 2025 saw double the number of startups hitting $10 million in ARR within three months compared to the number it did in 2024.

The letter also noted that Stripe Atlas – a business integration tool – saw a 41% increase in the company’s design over the past year. Of these new founders, 20% paid their first customer within 30 days, up from just 8% in 2020, underscoring how fast this new generation of founders are moving.

By comparison, in 2024, the founders were still there to celebrate in public hitting $10 million in ARR in three years – which is still, in most businesses, a metric worth bragging about.

So to all those on social media saying things like “Shooting up to $10M ARR is easier and riskier than building a VC-backed unicorn,” or things like, “AI startups hitting $10M ARR with just three people are rewriting the entire playbook,” well, now there’s a ton of data to prove it.