Hand holding smartphone displaying World app for Worldcoin identity verification with orb scanning device in background, Union Square, San Francisco, California, May 20, 2025. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

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Stripe told investors on Wednesday that Jan. 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 compared with 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 compared with 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 in 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: First, the Census projected formation series will show within four quarters whether the surge in applications translates into new employers; that measure has remained nearly flat this year even as applications climbed. Second, Stripe’s claims about stronger cohorts can be tested only if the company publishes the underlying data rather than simply describing it. Third, the OpenRouter deal creates a new reference point for AI infrastructure valuations—but one based 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 that a CEO first offered with a wink and has since promoted to doctrine.