The next unicorn might not hire anyone

A decade ago, startups often equated success with rapid headcount growth. The formula was simple: build a product, raise a round, hire fast. Bigger teams meant bigger bets. But the rulebook is getting rewritten as a new generation of startups scales with leaner teams and fewer people. They’re not building out sprawling customer support or sales teams, and seem to be automating what once warranted entire departments. Their growth is quite remarkable.

Cursor, which became the fastest-growing SaaS company in history, generated $200mn in revenue with 30 employees. Midjourney made $200mnn with 40. Ben Lang’s site Tiny Teams tracks these small-but-mighty operators, with several emerging from Europe too. Sweden’s Lovable has a 25-strong team and achieved a $1.8bnn valuation just over six months after launching. Vlayer Labs, headquartered in Warsaw, secured $10mnn in pre-seed funding with 20 employees, while Berlin-based Juna AI raised $7.5mn with a seven-person team.

These aren’t outliers. Startups of all kinds are slimming down, particularly in the consumer-facing and fintech sectors. In 2022, Carta, a platform that tracks startup equity and hiring trends, found that the average seed-stage consumer startup had 6.4 employees. By 2024, that number had dropped to 3.5. What’s next could redefine the startup world entirely.

Imagine a startup that scales to millions in revenue without hiring a single employee. No head of growth. No support team. Just code, bots, and maybe a founder or two in the control room. In 2024 – a lifetime given AI’s breakneck speed – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted the rise of one-person unicorns. As bleakly dystopian as it sounds, the zero-workforce startup is closer than we think.

1.0 burn multiples become the norm

While AI and automation are undoubtedly accelerating tech’s “Great Slimdown” – call it the Ozempic era for startups – this is not the only driver. Since the heady days of the 2021 bull market, the VC industry has contracted, prompting companies and investors to commit to efficiency with renewed fervour. The number of active venture capital firms in Europe dropped by 30% between 2022 and 2024, while venture funding to European startups saw a steep fall in Q3 2024. It plunged to $10 bn, the lowest since Q3 2020, a 39% YoY decline and a 36% drop quarter-over-quarter.

Tobias Bengtsdahl, a partner at VC firm Antler in the Nordics, has noticed the shift first-hand. “We invest in the very early days, when there’s only one to three founders, but already we’re sensing that they can go so much further and build so much more than in the past,” he explains.

Prior to Antler, Bengtsdahl founded personalised video message platform Memmo in 2019, which hit $10mn in revenue within two years, and expanded to 150 employees in 20 months. “In the zero interest craziness of 2021, it was more important how many engineers we had than how prudently we were spending,” he says. “This is a very real pendulum swing, where investors are increasingly cautious and careful now.” European startups also face a significantly tougher debt market: bank loans now carry rates of 9-13% for early-stage firms, up from near-zero a few years ago.

That caution is layered over a deeper, structural change. Founders aren’t just spending less, they’re building in a different way with AI and automation. Engineering teams, for example, are smaller due to code generation tools like GitHub Copilot and Tabnine, which enable developers to ship faster with less. In 2024, GitHub’s own research found that developers who used GitHub Copilot completed tasks 55% faster than the developers who didn’t. In the US, hiring for software development roles is down over 15% year-on-year, according to CompTIA.

Customer support (often one of the first departments to scale) is increasingly handled by AI. GPT-powered assistants like Intercom’s FinAI Agent resolve up to 80% of Tier 1 support tickets instantly, according to internal benchmarks. It’s a similar story in sales and marketing, where tools like Jasper and Breeze, HubSpot’s AI suite help generate outreach, content, and campaigns in a fraction of the time. For many founders, this AI infrastructure isn’t a stopgap — it’s a hiring philosophy, with early-stage CEOs delaying key hires and in some cases, deciding against filling certain roles.

As ultra-lean, AI-native startups become the norm, VCs are rethinking what constitutes a ‘scalable’ business. Molly Alter, partner at Northzone — the global VC firm behind Spotify, Klarna, and Trustpilot — says her team is spotting signs of product-market fit earlier, without the corresponding buildout. Expectations around revenue growth and burn multiples have morphed too. “A 1.0 burn multiple used to be incredibly impressive — a sign of disciplined, efficient growth — but it isn’t that rare anymore,” says Alter. “The bar has shifted.”

It’s reshaping the day-to-day of venture scouting too. “Before, part of the job was scanning LinkedIn for headcount spikes, but that’s no longer a good signal,” says Alter, who focuses on vertical SaaS and AI investments. “We have to get on the phone directly with every founder to understand what’s really going on.” She’s often asking probing questions like: Why is the team lean? What’s being automated, and what still requires human judgement? Is there a plan for where humans will matter most, and where they won’t?

And the once-assumed virtue of hiring itself might even be a red flag. “Investors and VCs in the market tell me they have no appetite for hyperscaling anymore,” says Roei Samuel, CEO and co-founder of networking platform Connectd. “At SXSW earlier this year, it was clear — unless you’re hiring for deep tech or there’s genuine defensibility around the expertise, they actually see hiring as a negative.”

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Some founders believe the lean era isn’t about shrinking teams — it’s about rebuilding them from scratch around AI. “If a company simply sprinkles AI on top of their existing org chart or workflow, the returns are marginal — maybe 5 to 10%,” says Joel Hellermark, founder of the Stockholm-founded AI company Sana. “We have to be willing to dismantle traditional organisational structures and rebuild from zero.”

​​Already, the “sprinkling” of AI on top of outdated hierarchies is creating friction. Employees are hiding productivity gains out of fear their roles will be automated. A report by Ivanti/Forbes found that almost one-third of employees who use AI in their jobs keep it secret from their employers. Among the reasons cited: 30% worry their job could be automated if managers find out, and 46% believe using AI would only lead to more work, not rewards. Organisational models designed for human spans of control break down when intelligence scales exponentially. The result is a widening gap between AI’s capabilities and what companies can structurally absorb.

Sana ran into this problem firsthand. “Our original tech stack was written in a language the model wasn’t proficient in,” says Hellermark. “It simply didn’t work.” Within two weeks, his team rewrote their architecture to be fully AI-native — and they would be prepared to do it again within months. Unburdened by legacy systems or politics, the youngest startups are best positioned to build (and rebuild) with AI from day one.

The shakeout also means rethinking what counts as top talent. “Over the last few decades, specialisms have gotten more and more narrow,” says Hellermark. “But now people are mastering domains in weeks, when it once took years.” At Sana, they look to hire generalists with deep pockets of expertise in a couple of areas and the instinct to work with, not against, intelligent systems. In Hellermark’s view, it’s the era of the polymath: part operator, part curator, someone with taste, adaptability, and the judgment to know when to trust an agent — and when not to.

In a landscape where hiring is rare and roles are constantly shifting, the stakes and premium being put on each hire are only getting higher. “If you’re using Cursor and cutting back on backend engineers, it becomes essential that you have a killer CTO, for example,” says Alter.

The evidence of the slimdown is hard to ignore; SignalFire data shows that Big Tech and startups are hiring roughly half as many early-career workers as a share of their total new hires, compared to just before the pandemic. Instead, companies are posting lower-level roles and hiring more experienced individuals to fill them, the report said. It’s a shift that underscores a central tension of the zero-workforce era: fewer people, but higher expectations.

Tech behemoths are already racing ahead. Amid layoffs that could cut nearly 4,000 jobs, Mark Zuckerberg is building a 50-person “superintelligence” team at Meta, with pay reportedly reaching into the nine figures. In a world where scale no longer depends on bodies in seats, the move signifies that companies will bet on fewer people — and demand exponentially more from them.

Zero workforce means a stagnant company

Tech’s Ozempic era will inevitably shape startup culture, innovation, and long-term resilience. But right now, it’s hard to tell where it will prove a strength and where it could become a structural vulnerability. Alter, of Northzone, worries about the human cost. “Three people doing the work of 30 would be fast, but fragile,” she says. “Imagine someone is sick, someone is on vacation, and the other wants to quit — there are definitely risks there.”

Already, burnout is pervasive. Blind surveys show startup employees regularly clock 50-60 hour weeks, with some pushing beyond 80. Yet a Stanford study by economist John Pencavel found that productivity starts to decline sharply after 50 hours. Startups have long optimised for speed, but at what expense?

That strain extends to innovation too. Alter warns that ultra-lean teams risk eliminating the margin for creativity. “It’s great to optimise your KPIs, but startups have to leave space for random ideas — the ones that aren’t efficient at the beginning but turn into something really great,” she says. With limited bandwidth, there’s little time left for experimentation or the slower, creative noodling of invention.

Still, this leaner landscape holds much promise. “Fewer mega-hire companies means more solo builders breaking out to try something of their own,” says Bengtsdahl. “And that’s no bad thing – I’d rather see a brilliant person start a company than become the 1,375th hire at one.”

The next generation of startups will be smaller, but also smarter, faster, and more experimental. And while a zero-workforce startup might be technically possible, it isn’t desirable — or even a true startup — in Bengtsdahl’s eyes. “A business that automates or outsources everything isn’t a startup, just a stagnant company,” he says. “A startup is, by definition, doing what hasn’t been done before and needs disruptive humans, not just programmed agentic AI.”

Bengtsdahl argues the real beauty of startups is their capacity to challenge incumbents and unsettle industries — and that means ideas and friction, not pure optimisation. “It will be a sad day if a single LLM can create better startups than any human,” he says.