Solo founders are crushing it. A $45M Series A, an Apple acquisition, and a new product launch. Let's get into it!
$50M. 12 People.
“You always want to be impressed by how few people there are at a startup.”
Solo founder Steve Basher closed a $5M pre-seed from Accel before hiring anyone. Then, a $45 million Series A from GV. His company, SolveAI, emerged from stealth this week, with only 12 employees.
Working at a high-growth startup before starting your own isn't necessary, but it can make things much easier: credibility, knowledge, and network.
Basher spent eight years at Palantir. His angels include Palantir's CISO, a Google DeepMind researcher, and an OpenAI exec. His first 12 hires came from Palantir, ElevenLabs, and Meta.
Congrats to the SolveAI team!
Apple acquires a solo founder.
“Keep putting things out there, and eventually someone on the same frequency will find you.”
Solo founder Martin Schubert didn't build a venture-backed startup. He built open-source research tools for AI photonics simulation and shared them publicly on GitHub.
Apple acquired Schubert’s company, invrs.io, to bring him in-house. He has nearly 100 patents and 40 peer-reviewed papers.
You don't need to fundraise to have an exit. Sometimes you just need to oscillate until you resonate.
What benchmarks can't show you.
“On standard benchmarks, you can't see how early planning and decisions compound over time.”
Two models can score identically on a benchmark and behave completely differently when it actually matters. Static evals don't capture how AI handles long-horizon tasks, shifting conditions, or adversaries.
Matan Halevy (SFP W26) built CivBench to address that. Frontier AI models play Civilization against each other over 200+ turns — a compelling proxy for AI's ability to complete complex tasks. Season one is live now.
Solo, together.
“There's this deeply limiting belief that you need to have a co-founder.”
Julian joined David Phillips (solo founder of Fondo) on the START pod to discuss why we're building Solo Founders.
It started with ODF. The conventional wisdom was that you could only find great co-founders through school, at work, or from someone you grew up with. We challenged that and proved it wrong. Incredible co-founder matches came out of ODF: Traba, Levels, Lassie.
Then we noticed a deeper problem. There's a limiting belief in the valley that you need a co-founder to start a company. Part of why it persists is that some VCs and accelerators reinforce it. Sam Lessin, Partner at Slow Ventures, argues: “It is cheap and easy de-risking. Can they recruit? Did someone else with a reasonable background co-sign the idea?” It's a shortcut for investors, but bad advice for founders.
If we prove that wrong, more great people (that's most of you) will actually start. And the ones who would've rushed into a bad partnership just to have a co-founder will end up better off because they didn't.
Thanks for reading! Please forward this to another solo founder who may find it helpful.
Solo, together.
— Kieran, Julian, & The Solo Founders Team
