🟢 US startups are rebuilding old businesses with 3 people and AI — is this the future of intrapreneurship too?
All the "cool" US startups are scaling old business models, running with thousands of people, with AI and a skeleton crew. It’s fast, cheap, and working. After years of intrapreneurship theatre, this could be the real playbook corporates need.
A new meaning for running lean
There’s a fascinating trend accelerating in the U.S. venture landscape right now: startups are raising serious capital not for new ideas, but for old ones done with 1/1,000th of the operational drag. Take any legacy business model—insurance, logistics, legal, recruitment—and run it lean, with a team of three ex-Stripe or ex-Google folks, some decent APIs, a stack of LLMs, and a few no-code tools. Boom. You just unlocked an 8-figure valuation.
And no, it’s not just hype. These companies scale faster, pivot quicker, and cash-flow better. They don’t disrupt business models—they make incumbents look obese. When it takes you 3,000 employees to do what 3 people and a cloud of prompts can now execute in real-time, it’s not a fair fight. It’s not even a fight.
Here are a few of the new golden boys:
