🚀 The AI Stack for Founders
How to launch and scale faster and leaner AI-powered startups
Have you noticed how fast startups are scaling lately? Every day, I’m seeing more companies go from 0 to 1 in days; and scale to $10M, $50M, even $100M in ARR not in years, but in months 🤯🚀. Thanks to the latest wave of AI tools, founders can now launch and scale companies with unprecedented efficiency. A small team (or even a solo founder) can build, validate, and grow a startup with minimal resources. This shift is fundamentally redefining how innovation happens ⚡.
As a data point: Y Combinator startups are now the fastest-growing and most profitable in the fund's history, driven largely by AI. The YC2025 cohorts are growing at an average of 10% per week, a pace never seen before in early-stage venture capital. For a quarter of these startups, 95% of the code is already written by AI models, enabling rapid iteration and market entry.
Here a reflection: As capital becomes more efficient, it may no longer be the dominant force behind building a category defining business. Instead, the edge will shift back to the fundamentals:
Visionary founders who can identify unmet needs and inspire others.
Direct access to market channels to test and sell quickly.
Smart talent who can creatively leverage AI tools to accelerate outcomes.
The most successful teams won’t just use AI, they’ll strategically apply it to create scalable, efficient, and impactful businesses.
In this new landscape, knowing how to use AI well may be the greatest startup advantage of all 🎯.
Let’s unpack the AI stack and what it offers to startup founders.
AI Tools for the Founder Journey
Below is a handpicked selection of some cutting-edge AI tools and platforms that are changing the game for early-stage founders. Many of these are not just tools, but fast-growing startups themselves, built by and for the new generation of builders. Whether you're crafting an MVP, generating leads, or managing your financials, this stack is designed to help you go from idea to traction with speed and precision.
💡 Validate Your Idea and Structure Your Startup
Using ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude is becoming essential for brainstorming, strategic thinking, market research and rapid prototyping. Founders use these models to test hypotheses, synthesize customer interviews, and iterate on ideas on the go. It’s like exchanging ideas with a virtual cofounder who’s always ready to help you think and build.
🖥️ Build Your Landing Page
Creating a landing page is often the first step to start sharing your startup idea with the rest of the world. Today, AI tools make it possible to go from concept to live website in minutes, no coding skills required. Here are two fast-growing platforms helping founders do just that:
Lovable: It is one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI startups, enabling non-coders to build websites and landing pages rapidly. Stockholm-based, has raised $22.5M to date, with a potential $100M round in progress that could value it at $1.5B.
Durable: The AI that builds a website for you, it allows to get your business online in 30 seconds. The platform has helped create over 6 million sites and is focused on small businesses. Based in Vancouver, Canada, Durable has raised $20M (including a $14M Series A led by Spark Capital).
👨💻 Code Your MVP
Founders today are building MVPs in weeks, not months, thanks to AI coding assistants, pretrained models, no-code APIs, and open-source frameworks. These tools dramatically cut development time, letting founders and engineers reach the market faster.
Here are a few platforms enabling this rapid build phase:
GitHub Copilot: AI coding assistant for engineers that suggests code as you type, helps debug faster, and speeds up development across multiple programming languages.
Lovable, Cursor, Windsurf: AI-native coding tools that turn plain language into working code, simplify product iteration, and support fast MVP development. These companies are experiencing tremendous momentum: Cursor recently surpassed $500M in ARR and just announced a $900 million Series C round, bringing its valuation to $9.9 billion. Windsurf has also gained incredible traction, leading to its acquisition by OpenAI for $3 billion in May 2025.
📩 Generate Leads and Reach Potential Clients
Platforms such as Clay, 11x or Genesy are transforming how startups approach lead generation, sales prospecting, and outreach, by letting founders identify high-quality leads, personalize messaging at scale, and automate sales workflows from end to end. As I shared in my post on AI for B2B sales, these tools enable early-stage teams to go to market faster, test more efficiently, and close more deals with fewer resources..
📣 Create Content for Marketing and Social Media
Creating compelling content is critical for visibility, awareness, brand building, and inbound lead generation. AI-powered tools help founders and marketers write faster, optimize for SEO, and design posts that drive engagement. Two examples of them are Jasper, an AI content generator for blogs, ads, and social media, and Frase, an AI-powered SEO copywriting and content optimization tool. There are many more tools available that allow you to create not only text posts but also images and videos in minutes.
👥 Hire your first employees
Hiring in the early days is tough. These platforms help startups find, evaluate, and onboard talent faster, whether through smarter sourcing or outsourcing whole teams on demand:
Ashby: AI-powered recruiting and applicant tracking system. Since emerging from stealth in September 2022, Ashby’s customer base has grown to over 1,300 brands, they closed a $30 million Series C in June 2024, bringing Ashby’s total raised to $70 million.
Perfect: an AI-driven recruiting platform that automates sourcing, outreach, and interview scheduling for startups and fast-growing companies. They are also seeing a big growth, which led them to raise a $23M round to tackle recruitment bottlenecks with pioneering Agentic AI.
Shakers: A platform that allows founders to outsource projects by matching them with top freelance talent that delivers quickly and efficiently. Powered by AI, founders simply describe what they need, and Shakers assembles a remote team to build it, leveraging Agentic AI for execution. One of the fastest-growing startups in Europe, Shakers recently closed a $14M round led by Partech, with participation from K Fund and Wayra.
📊 Manage Finances and Accounting
Hiring an external CFO? That’s so 2015 😉. Today, the smarter move is to bring in an AI accountant. These tools give founders real-time visibility, automate reconciliation, and dramatically speed up financial operations. Here are two standout examples:
Stacks is an automated accounting platform designed to simplify and accelerate the month-end book closing process for businesses. Leveraging AI, Stacks automates journal entries and reconciliation, seamlessly integrating with existing ERP systems to streamline financial workflows. Founded in Amsterdam, the company has raised $10 million across two funding rounds in 2024–2025.
Mesh gives founders a chat interface to ask simple questions about their financials like “What’s my average monthly cash burn over the last three months?” or “How many months of runway do I have?” It connects to company data, learns the business context, and books journals in real time. A YC startup from the Winter 2025 batch, Mesh has been experiencing rapid growth just a few months after launch.
What else?
The AI stack for founders is evolving fast. What once required large teams and months of effort can now be done in days using lean, AI-powered tools. As mentioned at the start, capital is no longer the only driver of innovation. Now, the edge belongs to sharp founders who can spot real problems, use AI effectively, and go to market with speed.
What do you think? 🤔 Any other interesting AI tools that founders should know?
