Stripe told investors on Wednesday that January 1 marked the beginning of the singularity. The evidence offered was a large inflection in long-run trends, with a sharp rise in the rate of new firm creation as the primary example. Census Bureau figures published a week earlier put July business applications at 578,926, up 8.1% from June, while projected formations of employer businesses from that same cohort rose 0.7%, to 29,959.
First-half revenue rose 41% year over year and free cash flow rose 43%. Stripe said 88% of the Forbes AI 50, including OpenAI and Anthropic, build on its platform, and that revenue share from AI and crypto customers more than doubled. Cofounders Patrick and John Collison signed the letter alongside William Gaybrick, president of technology and business.
In February, Patrick Collison told TBPN there was a reasonable chance Q1 2026 would be remembered as the first quarter of the singularity, adding that in hindsight the claim might look completely delusional. At Stripe’s April conference he used it again and conceded he was being partly tongue in cheek. By August it appears in a formal investor letter with no hedge attached, as an operating premise the company says it has run on for eight months.
The letter went out the same day Stripe confirmed it would acquire OpenRouter. The New York Times reported a price of $7.5 billion against the routing startup’s $1.3 billion valuation in May, and Axios put the figure above $8 billion. Founders will reportedly collect $1.5 billion, more than the entire company was worth three months earlier. That is the singularity thesis expressed as a price, and it establishes a comparable every seed investor in AI infrastructure will now cite in a partner meeting.
The letter argues that private ownership lets the company fund acquisitions without diluting holders, notes that share count is lower than three years ago despite significant M&A, and reports share price compounding at 31% since the Series D against 14% for the S&P 500. A February employee tender valued Stripe at $159 billion. It is separately pursuing PayPal with Advent International at $53 billion. An IPO stays on indefinite hold. Declaring a phase change is a coherent way to ask employees and investors holding illiquid stock to keep waiting.
Skeptics have been pushing back on this exact substitution; Gary Marcus argued in July that none of the markers now cited, whether a benchmark score or a company growing faster, satisfy any coherent definition of the term. Vernor Vinge’s original 1993 formulation described superhuman intelligence bringing the human era to an end. Accelerating revenue at a payments processor is a different claim wearing the same word.
Stripe’s defense is that it sees data almost nobody else does. Businesses on its platform processed $1.9 trillion in payment volume during 2025, up 34%, across more than five million companies. Collison has described a phase transition in which 2025 cohorts show both higher formation counts and better per-business performance, which is the more interesting and less quotable finding. Cohort quality is harder to manufacture than application volume. It is also unaudited, self-reported, and produced by a company whose valuation depends on the AI economy being real.
Three things are worth watching rather than accepting; 1) The Census projected formation series will reveal within four quarters whether this application surge converts to payroll, and that number has stayed close to flat all year while applications climbed. 2) Stripe’s cohort data becomes checkable only if the company publishes it in the next annual letter rather than describing it. And 3) the OpenRouter multiple now sets a reference point for AI infrastructure pricing, which means founders in adjacent categories will raise against it while investors underwrite a comparable built on a single buyer’s conviction.
For anyone allocating capital Stripe’s first-half financials are disclosed, specific, and consistent with an AI-driven expansion of its customer base. The singularity label is a narrative device a CEO first offered with a wink and has since promoted to doctrine.
