AI startup revenue per employee

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Welcome back to The Pulse, where we dive into interesting AI stories and trends backed by data, all presented through simple visuals.

> median revenue per employee: $1.8M

> all companies within 4-50 employees (avg ~24), leader Midjourney at 40

> 20-50 employee range dominates efficiency rankings vs too small & large ones

> Midjourney leads revenue ($500M); Eleven Labs distant second at $100M

> top performers Midjourney & Cal AI at $0 funding vs heavily-funded Recall.ai ($12.7M) & GPTZero ($13.5M) ranked lowest

> most founded within last 5 years (especially 2022-2023) & based in San Francisco

> LiveCodeBench Pro: leak-free problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI

> all models score 0% on hard competitive programming, but o4-mini leads Pareto frontier

> models excel at knowledge/logic-heavy problems but struggle with observation-heavy ones

> new preview of Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite released + Pro & Flash models made generally available

> Flash-Lite fastest and most cost-efficient Google model yet

> Flash-Lite (thinking) vs 2.5 Pro (thinking) benchmark performance:

• GPQA Diamond: 66.7% vs 86.4%

• AIME ‘25: 63.1% vs 88%

• LiveCodeBench: 34.3% vs 69%

• SWE-bench Verified (multiple attempts): 44.9% vs 67.2%

• Humanity’s Last Exam: 6.9% vs 21.6%

> major improvements over 2.0 Flash-Lite: AIME +39pp, SWE-bench +22pp, GPQA +16pp, LiveCode +5pp, Humanity's +2pp