--- title: "36% of New Companies Have Only One Founder: Unpacking the Truth About Super Individuals — 2026 AI OPC 100 Applications Open" author: "Unique Research" sourcePublication: "Unique Research Substack" originalPublishedAt: "2026-10-22T15:17:20+00:00" canonical: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/36-of-new-companies-have-only-one" source: "https://uniqueresearch.substack.com/p/36-of-new-companies-have-only-one" language: "en" --- # 36% of New Companies Have Only One Founder: Unpacking the Truth About Super Individuals — 2026 AI OPC 100 Applications Open [![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XMBK!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F134ea300-c408-41d4-b074-15fa3eef0241_1280x720.jpeg)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XMBK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F134ea300-c408-41d4-b074-15fa3eef0241_1280x720.jpeg) _Unique Research · AI OPC 100 · October 21, 2026_ _Looking for people who are the core decision-maker and value creator, who treat AI as the foundation of production and operations, and who can close the loop on product, content, service, or commerce on their own._ **2026 AI OPC 100** **Age 31. One person. $80 million.** > “When founders, policy, and capital all move in the same direction, it stops being a narrative about a hot trend — it is a real migration in organizational form.” In early 2025, 31-year-old Israeli founder **Maor Shlomo** began building a product called **Base44** alone: describe a need in natural language, and AI generates a complete, usable web application. No co-founder. No fundraising. Three weeks after launch, annualized revenue crossed **$1 million**. Six months later, **Wix** acquired it for **$80 million in cash** — at the time the company had only 250,000 users, fewer than 10 employees, was already profitable, and made about **$190,000 in monthly profit**. Shlomo was the sole shareholder. It is one of the cleanest answers yet to the question of how large a business one person can build. But Base44 is an extreme sample. What matters more is the curve behind it — which keeps getting steeper: More and more people are choosing to found alone, and policy and capital are chasing that choice. As the **2026 AI OPC 100** (Super Individual Top 100) opens for applications, we want to lay out several layers of truth about super individuals. Data from equity platform **Carta**: among newly registered U.S. companies, the share of solo founders rose from **23.7%** in 2019 to **36.3%** in the first half of 2025 — a **53%** increase over six years. More than one-third of new companies start with only one person from day one. The acceleration point is telling: from 2024 to 2025 the figure jumped from **30.5%** to **36.3%**, coinciding with AI coding and Agent tools going mainstream. This is not a blip. It is a structural curve that steepened under AI. China’s curve is steep as well. Research by Yao Jianhua’s team at Fudan University shows that in the first half of 2025, newly registered one-person companies (OPCs) nationwide rose **47%** year over year, with new entities concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta. As of May 2026, there were already **426** OPC communities and related venues nationwide, covering **26** provinces and **65** cities — nearly **80%** clustered in the east. > **When founders, policy, and capital all move in the same direction, it stops being a narrative about a hot trend — it is a real migration in organizational form.** Domestic attitudes toward OPCs are equally clear. At the institutional level, the revised Company Law removed the restriction that “one natural person may establish only one one-person limited company,” and allows the formation of one-person joint-stock companies. The 2026 Government Work Report, for the first time, called for “building a new form of the intelligent economy” and “cultivating intelligent-native new business forms and models.” At the local level, as of June this year, **65** cities had stood up OPC communities and issued a cumulative **106** related policies, of which **23** cities published dedicated OPC support policies. The support is real money: Beijing’s Haidian District subsidizes OPC firms’ use of agent tools with model vouchers — up to **50%** of cost, capped at **RMB 2 million** per company per year. Hangzhou’s Shangcheng District set up a dedicated OPC fund with a total size of **RMB 1 billion**, aiming to build **10** OPC communities and gather **1,000** OPC founders within a year. Local definitions of a “one-person company” are also revealing: Hainan caps employees at **5**; Shanghai and Suzhou draw the line below **10**; Hangzhou and Wuhan relax it to **20**. What policy is defining has never been “how many people,” but a new organizational form centered on the individual and supported by intelligent collaboration. Carta data show that among startups founded in 2024, solo-founder companies accounted for about **30%**, but only **14.7%** of capital raised in priced rounds that year went to them. More than one-third of people are founding alone; capital still puts more than **80%** of its chips on teams. That gap shapes how super individuals survive: without runway, they have to live on revenue from day one. Base44 raised zero financing throughout. Almost every Israeli fund approached Shlomo; he turned them all down — the company already had about **$200,000** in monthly subscription revenue, with no reason to dilute. Dutch indie developer **Pieter Levels** runs Nomad List, Photo AI, and other products alone, with annual revenue above **$2 million**; his entire “financing” is user subscriptions. The other side of the return structure is rarely mentioned: Carta data show that at exit, solo founders’ median ownership is about **75%** higher than that of core founders in multi-founder companies. The same exit leaves a completely different magnitude for the individual. When the bottleneck of founding shifts from capital to judgment, ownership itself is the reward. Anthropic CEO **Dario Amodei** put it more bluntly in May 2025: the probability that the first “one-person unicorn” — a company founded and run by one person, valued above **$1 billion** — appears in **2026** is **70% to 80%**. Whether it materializes or not, the direction is no longer in dispute. After the upside stories, the other half has to be told honestly. Under the boom, problems are already showing. Reporting by _Oriental Outlook_ (瞭望东方周刊) pointed to three: - **Homogenized competition** — subsidy rules and park products converge across cities; beware “hype the concept, empty parks, subsidize on entry, no industry on landing.” - **Insufficient scene supply** — some “communities” are just shared offices renamed; practitioners can only live on subsidies. - **Digital divide** — OPC founders today are mainly young people with technical skills and tech-company backgrounds; large numbers of ordinary workers lack both tool capability and entrepreneurial awareness, which runs against the original intent of “inclusive innovation.” There is a more hidden cost as well: OPC practitioners are business owners in law, yet in practice are both owner and employee, bearing all operating risk and debt alone — uncertainty once shared by an organization is transferred wholesale onto the individual. Even Shlomo himself has said the cost of having no co-founder is that “in hard moments, there is no one to share the weight.” Tools raise the floor, but the ceiling is still set by people: depth of understanding of user needs, channels for acquiring customers, and the ability to settle AI into a working system of one’s own — not stopping at “knowing how to use the tools.” That is exactly what we most wanted to clarify when we created this list. As “super individual” becomes a buzzword, it is also being diluted: some equate it with follower count; some treat it as a polite way to say “I don’t want a job”; some use AI as a marketing tag. Our definition is stricter: > **A person who is the core decision-maker and value creator, who treats AI as the foundation of production and operations, and who can independently complete a closed loop of product, content, service, or commerce.** Three boundaries: - **The key is not “one person,” but whether AI has entered the core workflow** — using AI to write copy or generate images does not count; AI must deeply participate in critical links of research, creation, development, operations, marketing, or delivery. - **Collaboration is allowed; “shell companies” are not** — a small number of long-term collaborators, contractors, or temporary helpers is fine, but the candidate must be the accountable owner of direction, core capability, and main outcomes. - **Traffic is not a pass; verification is** — there must be real users, customers, revenue, repeat purchase, or industry feedback; concepts and demos alone cannot replace real results. What we are ranking is “a complete capability that AI has grown on top of one person.” The **2026 AI OPC 100** (Super Individual Top 100) seeks, worldwide, **100** representative people who use AI as their core leverage and who personally lead value creation and the operating closed loop. **Application deadline:** November 6, 2026 **Award notice:** November 9, 2026 The list covers four directions, with no industry quotas: - **AI product & technology:** indie developers, product builders, open-source authors — whether an individual can lead product definition, development, release, and ongoing operations. - **AI content & IP:** operators in video, music, visual arts, games, writing, digital humans, and personal brands — whether they have formed a sustained production system and operable IP, not a one-off work. - **AI professional services & commerce:** advisors, designers, marketers, and cross-border operators — whether they have used AI to build a high-quality, replicable loop of customer acquisition and delivery. - **AI knowledge & ecosystem:** researchers, educators, community organizers, and knowledge-product operators — whether they have turned expertise into sustainable products and ecosystem impact. Review is based mainly on the candidate’s real progress over the most recent **12 months**, weighted across four dimensions: **AI collaborative leverage (30%)**, **product & delivery capability (25%)**, **market & impact verification (25%)**, and **sustainable growth & responsibility (20%)**. Different directions are not compared on absolute traffic or revenue; revenue is not the sole threshold, but evidence must be verifiable. The candidate pool will be formed from open applications, ecosystem nominations, proactive research by the organizing committee, and expert recommendations, then finalized after materials verification, fact-finding, and expert review. The list will be released on **November 19, 2026**, live at the **“2026 Extraordinary Awards · Beijing · AI Creators Conference”** (2026 非凡大赏 · 北京 · AI 创造者大会), alongside the **2026 CHINA AI 100** — together forming a complete picture: > **On one side, the Top 100 AI-native companies; on the other, the Top 100 AI super individuals — both ends of organization are being rewritten.** There is **no application fee**. The application entry and materials template will be announced shortly; follow subsequent posts from this account. If you are such a person — someone who has assembled an invisible team with AI, and already has real work and real users — you are welcome to apply. If you know such a person, please forward this article to them. > **The 2026 list should have your names on it.** --- Original publication: https://uniqueresearch.substack.com/p/36-of-new-companies-have-only-one On-site reading page: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/36-of-new-companies-have-only-one