Solo Founding at a Record Share: What Stripe Atlas and Carta Show

Two datasets, two different crowds

Stripe Atlas is Stripe's incorporation service. It forms a Delaware LLC or a Delaware C corporation for founders anywhere in the world.⁶ Stripe's 63% covers only the C corporations. It defines a solo founder as a person who "launched a startup through Stripe Atlas without any cofounders."¹ That's a big pool: 23,000 companies incorporated through Atlas in 2025, and Stripe says Atlas now incorporates one in five Delaware C corps.⁵

Carta sells cap-table software, the record of who owns what in a company. Its Founder Ownership Report 2025 used anonymized data from more than 45,000 startups incorporated from 2015 through 2024 to describe "the U.S. venture ecosystem."³ Its later Solo Founders Report 2025 tracks the share of new startups with a solo founder from 2019 to the first half of 2025.⁴

So the two sources look at different companies. Atlas founders chose Stripe's service to form a company; Carta's startups use software built for managing equity and fundraising. That alone can explain why their levels differ so much.

The trend inside each dataset

Stripe Atlas. Solo founders made up 63% of the C corps formed so far in Q2 2026, which Stripe calls "an all-time high."¹ The chart in the same post plots each quarter from Q1 2022 to Q2 2026, with the last point dated May 20, 2026. Its line dips after early 2023 and climbs through 2025 to that latest point.¹

Carta, Founder Ownership Report 2025. About 35% of new startups in 2024 had a solo founder, up from 29% in 2023 and 17% in 2017. In the same year, 16% had three founders, 7% had four and 4% had five, each the lowest in ten years of the data.²

Carta, Solo Founders Report 2025. The solo share of new startups rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025.⁴

All three series point the same way inside their own samples. None of them can tell you the share for startups as a whole.

More solo founders, a wider spread of results

Stripe's post pairs the record share with revenue data. Among solo-founded Atlas startups, median revenue in the first six months fell 23% year over year in 2025, while revenue at the top decile (the best-earning tenth) rose 19%. Four years earlier, the top decile made about 34 times the median's six-month revenue; in 2025 it was 61 times.¹ Stripe gives those changes as percentages and multiples, not dollar amounts.

Carta's numbers show a funding gap. Solo founders led 35% of the companies incorporated on Carta in 2024 but only 17% of the 2024 companies that also closed a venture capital round before the year ended.² Stripe reports a low early-funding rate across Atlas startups as a whole: of those at least six months old in 2025, 2.2% had raised money within three months of incorporating, down from 3.1% in 2024.⁵

Why the 63% and the 35% don't line up

Different populations, different definitions, different periods. Stripe's figure is one partial quarter of Atlas C corps. Carta's figures are calendar years or half-years across startups on its platform. Even Carta's own two reports aren't a single series: the Founder Ownership Report and the Solo Founders Report were built for different questions, so we list them as separate rows rather than joining 35% (2024) to 36.3% (H1 2025) into one line.

Reading the two side by side, the defensible statement is narrow: in each dataset the solo share is higher now than in its earlier years. Saying "most startups now have one founder" would take Stripe's sample as the whole market, which it isn't.

What neither dataset shows

Both samples are self-selected: a company appears only because its founders picked Atlas or Carta. Neither covers the much larger world of one-person businesses that never form a startup corporation. The US Census Bureau tracks those in its Nonemployer Statistics: businesses with no paid employees, which make up the majority of US business establishments, most of them sole proprietorships.⁷

"Solo founder" also isn't the same as "company of one." A solo-founded startup can hire staff; Stripe's own post quotes founders on extending themselves "through great hires, advisors, and founder networks."¹ The figures count who founded the company, not how many people work there today.

C corps, LLCs and what Atlas founders commonly choose

Stripe published the solo share for C corporations only. Atlas also forms LLCs, which Stripe describes as "the structure often chosen by small teams and bootstrapped businesses for its flexibility."⁵ Stripe hasn't published the solo-founder share among its LLCs, so the 63% says nothing about them. Which entity fits a given company is a legal and tax question; Stripe's own documentation says Atlas "doesn't provide legal, tax, or accounting advice."⁶

On the time side, Stripe says Atlas sets up a company with a bank account, payments and fundraising tools "in two business days," and that it retrieves the company's tax ID (EIN) and files 83(b) elections for each founder.⁶ Vendor-stated The two-day figure is Stripe's own claim, not an independent measurement (how we label figures).