State of Startups 2025

Founder and Company

Who’s Building Startups

Today’s startup ecosystem is dominated by young, technical builders shipping fast with lean teams.

Roles and Experience

Founders are overwhelmingly technical and under 40, with most building their first company.

Q&A

What is your functional role at your startup?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Team Size and Funding

Startups are mostly bootstrapped or at early stages of funding. They are small teams, and usually less than a year old.

Q&A

What stage of funding is your startup in?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Where They’re Based

Startups are building globally, but North America—especially San Francisco—remains overrepresented. Europe and Asia also feature prominently, with hubs like Toronto and NYC following close behind.

Q&A

Where is your startup headquartered?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Product and Market

What Startups are Building

Startups are still experimenting. They’re building a diverse mix of software products, iterating quickly, and pursuing monetization selectively.

Industries and Focus

Under-30s gravitate toward AI-driven productivity, education, and social tools; areas where rapid iteration and novelty matter. Over-50s skew toward SaaS and consumer products, often bringing domain-specific experience into more established markets. Developer tools and infrastructure attract all age groups.

Q&A

What is your startup’s primary industry or target customer segment?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

AI-powered productivity tools

Problems startups are solving

Traction and Early Growth

One in five startups joined an accelerator. Y Combinator is the most common choice, especially in North America. Elsewhere, participation was more evenly distributed. Pivoting remains the norm, and less than half of startups are monetizing today.

Q&A

If your startup has participated in an accelerator, which one?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Tech Stack

What’s in a Startup’s Tech Stack

The modern stack centers around open tools, modular infrastructure, and cautious spending.

Frameworks and Cloud Infra

Supabase and Postgres dominate backend infrastructure. React and Node top frontend and backend respectively. Cursor, Claude, and VS Code lead AI-assisted development. Developer tools like GitHub, Stripe, and Postman round out the stack.

Q&A

Which database(s) is your startup using?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Dev Tools and Time Savers

AI coding tools are indispensable for startups, and not just Cursor and Visual Studio Code. ‘Vibe coding’ tools like Loveable, Bolt.new, and v0 are also common.

Q&A

Which AI coding tools do you use?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Unified backend platform combining auth, edge, database, and queues

Tools that startups wish existed

AI and Agents

How Startups are Integrating AI

AI is a core product capability, not an afterthought. Most teams are using models like OpenAI or Claude for real features, not just demos.

In-Product AI Use

Most startups are already integrating models like OpenAI or Claude, especially for semantic search, summarisation, and customer support. Half are building agents to automate real tasks, from onboarding flows to sales triage.

Q&A

Which AI models are you using or planning to use?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Summarization / content generation

Most important AI use cases in product

Influence

Where Startups Go to Learn

Online communities are the learning engine behind every early-stage startup.

Online Communities

There is a healthy diaspora of important online communities. That said, many people just lurk; few actively contribute to the discussion.

Q&A

Which social media platforms do you use at least 3× per week?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Inspiration Stack

Founders follow newsletters like TLDR and Lenny’s, and they listen to podcasts like The Diary of a CEO and Founders. Tool discovery happens quite often via YouTube or GitHub. Physical event participation remains low.

Q&A

Where do you usually discover new dev tools or startup ideas?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Go-To-Market

How Startups are Finding Customers

Startups start selling through their networks and dev communities. Only when they grow do they layer in more structured growth via CRMs and sales.

Initial Customers

Founders earn their earliest customers through networks, communities, and inbound content. Paid acquisition rarely works early on, nor does performance marketing.

Q&A

Where did your startup’s initial paying customers come from?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Founder-led Sales

Sales is still founder-led at most startups. Dedicated sales hires usually don’t arrive until after 10+ employees. Many still use Google Sheets or nothing at all to track sales activity.

Q&A

What tools are you using to manage your sales process?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Outlook

Biggest Challenges for Startups

Startups remain optimistic about the future but are weighed down by technical complexity, customer acquisition hurdles, and a wish list of tools that still don’t exist.

The Road Ahead

The hardest problems are still the oldest ones: customer acquisition, product-market fit, and complexity. Startups cite AI-assisted coding and backend services as major time-savers, but many are still missing critical tools they want. Especially around onboarding, dashboards, and agents.

Q&A

What’s the biggest business challenge your startup is facing today?

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Worldview and Optimism

Most startup founders remain upbeat about the future, but that confidence isn’t shared equally. Engineers and marketers show more caution.

Q&A

Given the state of the world, are you…

No responses match those filters. Maybe next year?

Builders choose Supabase

Supabase is the Postgres development platform. Build your startup with a Postgres database, Authentication, instant APIs, Edge Functions, Realtime subscriptions, Storage, and Vector embeddings.

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Thank you

A special thanks to the following companies for participating in this year’s survey.