Five years of Atlas: founders beyond the Valley
Stripe Atlas launched in 2016 to help founders incorporate and run their companies online. Five years later, more than 20,000 businesses have started on the platform, collectively generating over $3 billion in revenue. A survey of more than 1,000 Atlas founders offers a picture of who these entrepreneurs are and what they need.
Atlas founders operate across 162 countries. Examples include Istanbul-based Duygu Kutluoğlu Kılıç, whose restaurant menu startup FineDine raised venture capital and expanded to 64 additional countries, and San Francisco's Casey Newton, who grew the Platformer newsletter to 50,000 subscribers in under a year.
Founder demographics and growth markets
Most Atlas founders sit outside the traditional tech founder profile. Ninety-one percent are not based in Silicon Valley. The fastest-growing regions outside the US include Nigeria (400% year-over-year growth), the United Arab Emirates (165%), and India (66%). Twenty-eight percent of founders identify as minorities in their country, and 24% are immigrants. Only 12% identify as female, which is slightly better than the portfolios of major startup accelerators or venture capital firms. Forty-three percent of Atlas founders are first-time founders, and nearly 10,000 of those started within the past year, suggesting a resurgence in entrepreneurship after roughly three decades of decline.
Ambitious and hiring
Forty-five percent of founders report that the pandemic accelerated their business, and many have adapted their financing and hiring to meet new demand. Nearly two-thirds are currently bootstrapped, while about half plan to raise capital soon. Atlas businesses have raised $4.1 billion in total, nearly twice what Stripe itself has raised. Mexico City-founded conversational commerce platform Yalo recently raised $50 million, illustrating investor interest in high-growth tech outside traditional geographies. Helsinki-based glucose monitoring startup Veri grew from 4 to 15 employees in the last year.
All Atlas businesses together employ 99,000 people today and plan to hire over 120,000 more within the next 12 months, bringing the total to 219,000 jobs worldwide. Seventy-nine percent of Atlas businesses hire domestically, indicating a direct contribution to local communities and GDP.
The main barrier: bureaucracy
When asked about the greatest barrier to entrepreneurship, a plurality of founders (43%) cited "bureaucracy." Many would-be entrepreneurs abandon their business ideas due to process roadblocks or delays, such as waiting for a tax ID delivered by fax machine. Stripe maintains that forming and running a company should be efficient end-to-end, and that governments can support entrepreneurship by digitizing and optimizing regulatory services, as Estonia has done with its e-Residency program. Among over 800 survey recommendations for how government can better help founders, the most common were "access to grants or loans," "simpler taxes," and "better local incentives or resources."
While Atlas startup growth has outpaced global economic growth, Stripe says it has not yet found the ideal recipe for supporting founders worldwide. The company continues to build new Atlas features aimed at making entrepreneurship more accessible for the next generation of founders.
