Can one person build a business valued at $1 billion, or even closer? We may not be getting close from a solopreneur perspective, but we are getting close in terms of extreme valuations built on small teams.

The one-person billion-dollar business concept was first broached by Tim Cortinovis in his book, Single-Handed Unicorn: How to Solo Build a Billion-Dollar Company , in which he states thar such a solopreneur enterprise can be scaled through AI agents, AI tools, and freelancers.

The concept is “absolutely realistic,” said Rupali Jain , chief product officer at Optimizely. This is especially the case looking at the ratio of employees to revenue in a number of enterprises, she told me at her company’s recent conference in New York. “If you average it out by enterprise value, and look at the number of people, haven’t they already done that?”

Consider that Telegram, a 30-person company (not including contractors) that has a current valuation of $30 billion, or $1 billion per employee. Anthropic is a trillion-dollar company with about 5,000 employees – or about $200 million per employee. Or OpenAI, with about 7,000 employees and a valuation at $850 billion, equates to $121 million per employee.

“While it’s not hard to think that a single human could do it, a $3-billion business with three humans can exist, and we’re within sniffing distance of those,” Jain said. “Look at the valuations.”

Artificial intelligence and digital technologies is making such scalability a reality. “I think what’s really interesting is AI has given us, not as labor replacement, but a small army or a small team that you can do things with. That makes a billion-dollar business more tractable.”

“If you’d asked me five years ago, ‘is this feasible?’ I’d say, ‘not really, because you need this many salespeople and you need this outreach.’ But now you don’t need to be an enterprise seller.”

Still, there is also healthy skepticism to the concept. “I keep seeing this ‘one-person unicorn’ thing pop up in my feed, usually attached to a slide with a hockey-stick chart, and every time I think: sure, in theory,” said Andy Thurai , CEO and founder of The Field CTO.

Theoretically, it can work, Thurai continued. “If you can hand off enough of the operational grind to agents, you really do stop needing 40 people on payroll to hit meaningful revenue. No benefits to administer, no office to rent. And nobody arguing about desk chairs."

One founder Thurai knows tried pricing an all-agent business out, and “got margins near 99%,” Thurai said. "On paper that lets you go take a chunk of a VC-funded competitor’s customers just by being cheaper, since they still have 30 people to pay every two weeks and you don’t.”

There is a catch, however. “The whole thing rests on infrastructure you don’t own,” said Thurai. “Change a rate limit on the model you’re built on, or reprice a cloud tier you’ve quietly become dependent on, and the ground under this business just shifts. It’s less market risk and more like building your house on someone else’s land and hoping they don’t feel like renegotiating.”

Then there’s the 3 a.m. call about a security breach. “’Just me’ is not the answer that gets a deal past legal," said Thurai. "I watched a founder lose a six-figure contract almost entirely over this, not the product, just the fact that there was no bench behind him.”

There is another risk to such enterprises. “When it’s just you, nobody’s in the room saying ‘I think this is wrong,’” said Thurai. "Agents execute what you tell them. They don’t tell you your plan has a hole in it. Maybe that catches up with you in six months, maybe two years, but I’d bet on it catching up eventually.”

One thing is certain: there are opportunities to grow companies at an unprecedented pace. “These days, what’s changing about companies is the pace and the ambition you can have around growth,” said Jain. “Look at all these new companies, and the milestones they’re hitting. They’re hitting them at incredible paces that we have never been seen before. And you don’t need the same number of people to grow. You just need one or two people now to really get traction.”