Stripe: AI startups grow much faster than non-AI SaaS

We interviewed nearly 100 founders who built AI startups.

One thing that stood out was how quickly they were able to go from zero to significant revenue.

New data from Stripe, one of the world's largest payment processing companies, confirms this: AI startups, on average, grow much faster than conventional SaaS startups.

The data

Stripe has information about almost every major startup because, well, almost every major startup uses Stripe to process payments.

Stripe pulled data on annual revenue for the 100 highest-grossing privately held AI companies using their payments platform as of July 31 2024, compared with a comparable cohort of promising SaaS start-ups as of July 2018. 

The goal was to determine whether (and how quickly) AI startups grew compared to their non-AI counterparts.

The results

Faster to $1 million: AI startups took a median of 11 months to hit $1M in annual revenue. This was 4 months shorter than their non-AI counterparts, which took 15 months to hit $1M.

The difference was even more pronounced when you zoomed out and compared the median number of months it took for AI vs. non-AI startups to reach to $30M:

For AI startups, it took ~20 months to get to $30M in revenue.

For conventional SaaS startups, it took well over 60 months to get to $30m+ in revenue.

That's a pretty big difference; AI startups were 5 times as fast to get to $30M as compared to non-AI SaaS companies.

56% of revenue comes from overseas

AI demand is global; on average, 44% of the revenue for AI companies come from the US and 56% came from overseas. In countries like Signature and Iceland, for example, more than 3% of the whole population is actively purchasing from the top 100 AI companies, according to a Stripe spokesperson.

A caveat

This report analyzed huge AI companies who were burning millions, if not billions of dollars in cash. The report analyzed revenue and not profitability; many of the companies analyzed are losing money.

However, I still found this report to be useful for indie hackers because...

What can IHers learn from this data?

AI isn't just a trend; companies are making real money from it. The demand is there and people/businesses are willing to pay for something that AI enables them to do faster/cheaper/more effective.

This analysis focused on mostly funded startups with a lot of cash to burn; we've seen in our interviews that founders can create something that's both profitable and grows fast:

• Gemma created an AI Bot generator making between $8k and $12k.

• Timo created a voice AI SaaS that's profitable.

• Pauline created a home staging SaaS making $8k/mo.