Do AI-enabled companies need fewer people?

Seldo checks his own year-old prediction that AI-driven automation would unlock enough new demand to also create new tech jobs. Startups in 2026 are raising record money in record time: $189 billion flowed into startups in February 2026 alone, with OpenAI, Anthropic and Waymo taking 83% of that. Yet headcount keeps shrinking. A seed-round startup averaged 6.4 employees in 2022 and under 3.5 in 2024; median Series A headcount fell from 57 in 2020 to 47.

AI-native startups run 40% smaller teams than non-AI SaaS companies while raising bigger rounds: $51.9M average Series A versus $39.9M, $3.48M revenue per employee versus $580K (6x higher), and 15-20 people at $10M ARR versus 50-70 for traditional companies.

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• Tech layoffs hit over 126,000 workers at US companies in 2025, continuing into 2026 even as layoff counts trend down overall.
• AI-related companies captured $211 billion of 2025’s $425 billion total global VC funding, an 85% year-over-year jump in AI’s own share.
• New monthly hires across the startup ecosystem fell more than 50% between January 2022 and January 2024, per Carta’s tech-heavy customer data.
• The data points to labor being substituted by compute; the new-jobs wave Seldo predicted a year ago hasn’t shown up in these numbers yet.