Stripe's AI chief revenue officer shared what the payments data actually shows about AI company growth, and the numbers are absurd.
Maia Josebachvili runs AI go-to-market at Stripe. The company processes payments for most of the fastest-growing AI companies, which means Stripe sees their actual revenue. At SaaStr AI, she walked through the data.
The Growth Numbers
Stripe's top AI cohort grew 120% in 2024, then 175% in 2025. That acceleration at scale breaks the usual B2B pattern where growth rates decay as you get bigger.
The outliers: Lovable hit $100M in eight months, then reached $400M eight months later. Cursor hit $1B run rate in under two years, then $2B three months later. Anthropic went from $1B to $30B run rate in about two years.
Consumer spend is moving too. Stripe Link data shows 14 million consumers now buy AI products, up from 6 million a year ago. Average spend per buyer is $371, up from $140. That is more than the average American spends on internet, streaming, and phone combined.
What This Means for GTM
Time from idea to first paying customer is now under six weeks on platforms like Replit and Vercel. iOS app releases jumped 24% month over month once agentic coding tools went mainstream. Delaware incorporations followed the same curve.
AI companies reach 42 countries in year one and 120 by year three. Traditional B2B used to mean winning the home market first, then hiring a GM in London. That playbook is dead. Gamma, based in San Francisco, did $100M in year one, and most of it came from outside the U.S.
Across top AI companies, 48% of revenue comes from outside the home market. Localized pricing drives 18% higher cross-border revenue. Adding one local payment method drives a 7% uplift.
Two in three Forbes AI50 companies now use usage-based pricing, up from under half last summer. The shift makes sense: an engineer running batch agents overnight and someone using ChatGPT instead of Safari are using the same product completely differently.
ANZ Context
Stripe employs roughly 8,000 people globally, with about 167 in Australia and 10 in New Zealand. The company is actively hiring in Sydney, including an Account Executive for Product Sales in money management. Public estimates put 2024 revenue at $5.1 billion.
For sales teams, the takeaway is practical: if you are selling into AI companies, their GTM motion looks nothing like traditional B2B. They scale faster, go global earlier, and price differently. If you are selling at an AI company, the comp opportunity is there, but so is the pressure to move at a pace that would have seemed impossible three years ago.