Atlas Year
The @Stripe Atlas team just published their year in review. Because Atlas now incorporates so many startups (23,000+ thus far in 2025), it’s an interesting snapshot of broader ecosystem trends. Some of the findings that I thought were interesting:
• Atlas incorporations grew 36% Y/Y. More than 20% of Delaware C Corporations are now started with Atlas. (Delaware corporations are started for lots of reasons, obviously -- large companies creating subsidiaries, etc. -- so Atlas represents some larger fraction of overall startup creation.)
• Founders of Atlas companies can come from anywhere and Europe was the fastest-growing region (+48% Y/Y). My speculative hypothesis is that this is because dealing with incorporation is very annoying and bureaucratic in many European countries, and the knowledge that you can just use a US corporation is becoming more widespread. A lot of European leaders are aware of these issues and I’m hopeful that they’ll act.
• Multinational founding teams are 79% more common (among multi-founder teams) than they were in 2017. This feels like a straightforward dividend of remote work, but the effect size is surprising to me.
• Time-to-revenue is accelerating. Remarkably, the median Atlas startup that incorporated in 2025 generated 39% more revenue in its first 6 months than its 2024 counterpart. And while there were more incorporations than ever this year, it is also true that a growing fraction of companies reached $100k of revenue within 6 months. That is, both quantity and some kind of quality (at least in revenue terms) are increasing. I’m not exactly sure how to explain this. I think the null hypothesis is simply that AI and stablecoins have opened the aperture of possibility, a vast surge of startups is mobilizing, and customers are eagerly flocking.
• The variance is increasing. While the median company generated 39% more revenue than last year, the 90th percentile company generated 52% more, and the 99th generated 67% more. Again, this is a year-over-year change -- pretty striking. This trend aligns with the anecdotes: startups like @cursor_ai and @Lovable (both of which incorporated with Atlas) are posting truly unprecedented revenue growth figures.
One of my favorite aspects of Stripe is getting to see trends like these play out in real time. If you’re interested in building tools that directly enable this entrepreneurship and innovation, you should get in touch.