Delaware C corporations grew an average of 41% year over year for the past 6 months, according to the Delaware Division of Corporations. US investors deployed more capital into larger seed rounds in 2025 compared to previous years, enabling founders to hire earlier, accelerate product development, and invest in customer acquisition from the outset. Case in point: among startups incorporated through Stripe Atlas, a platform that helps founders incorporate their company, 20% now land their first paying customer within 30 days of incorporation—more than double the rate in 2020. 

Notably, this acceleration in early-stage revenue growth happened even as the share of funded Atlas startups declined in 2025, suggesting that speed-to-revenue isn’t just a function of outside funding. 

Atlas now incorporates one in five Delaware C corps, giving us unique visibility into how quickly founders generate revenue, how they structure teams, and how many countries and customers they reach in their first months. Looking at our data from the 23,000 companies that incorporated in 2025 versus prior years, three shifts stand out: customer bases are more international than ever, time-to-revenue has compressed, and founders are turning their attention to AI agents over AI infrastructure or copilots.

Startups in 2025 are more global than ever

The number of countries represented by Atlas incorporations hit 169 in 2025—an all-time high—up from 158 in 2024. This year also marked Atlas’s first-ever founders from the Central African Republic, Comoros, San Marino, and Vanuatu. 

While 56% of Atlas startups are based in the US, the founder base has become more global.