By Mukundan Sivaraj · AIM Media House
As AI startups gobble up record VC dollars (AI venture funding hit $131.5 billion in 2024, a scrappy subset of firms is proving that self-funding can still win. These companies built real businesses from day one, focusing on customer revenue and profitability instead of fundraising.
For example, Surge AI (bootstrapped by ex-Facebook engineer Edwin Chen) grew to “well north of $1 billion” in 2024 revenue. Midjourney (the popular text-to-image AI) likewise reports around $200 million in 2024 revenue while remaining “completely bootstrapped”with no VC funding. 1.
Surge AI Surge AI was founded in May 2020 by MIT grad Edwin Chen, who quit Meta and launched the company from his San Francisco apartment. The company offers human-in-the-loop data services, a premium data-labeling platform that provides AI developers with high-quality annotated training data.
Chen’s strategy was unusual: he charges 10× the market rate to hire PhD-level labelers and experts, betting that AI labs will pay for quality. Remarkably, Surge took off without a dollar of outside capital. The company “was entirely self-funded” from the start and hit profitability almost immediately.
Surge’s revenue “went from zero to profitable in 90 days” after launch, and by 2024 the business was “well north of $1 billion” in annual revenue. Chen credits bootstrapping with forcing focus: as he puts it, Surge built a “real business” rather than a “VC science project.” 2.
Midjourney Founded in 2021 by David Holz (formerly of Leap Motion), Midjourney Inc. is based in San Francisco. It provides a generative AI art platform accessible via Discord: users type text prompts and Midjourney’s AI produces high-quality images and artwork.
The service quickly attracted millions of users (reports cite tens of millions on Discord) and even major enterprise clients, all via its subscription plans. Unlike almost every other hot AI startup, Midjourney took no funding. It has been “completely bootstrapped” with no outside capital.
The company rapidly became profitable – Holz told The Register in 2022 that Midjourney “was already profitable” by that time – and by 2024 it was on pace for roughly $200 million in revenue.
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