Fastest to $100M ARR companies are agentic

Edition 146 | December 22, 2025

Last week I joked about wanting Claude gift cards for Christmas.

And Anthropic actually shipped them!

I promise I don’t have a direct line to their product roadmap (yet).

Welcome back to Building AI Agents, your biweekly guide to everything new in the field of agentic AI!

Happy Holidays, there will be no edition this week Thursday.

In today’s issue…

• Fastest growing companies today are selling agents

• Visa completes its first autonomous agent transaction

• Enterprise teams buy AI agents like new hires

• Anthropic lets Claude run a real vending machine

• Why autonomy beat intelligence in 2025

…and more

🔍 SPOTLIGHT

The old playbook said reaching $100M ARR takes 5-7 years. Manus just did it in 8 months. Lovable did the same, then doubled to $200M four months later.

If you look at the fastest-growing software companies right now (Manus, Lovable, Cursor, Replit) they share one trait. They're not selling Copilots. They're selling Agents.

The insight came from watching where revenue actually accelerated. For two years, the industry bet on Copilots: AI that sits beside you and offers suggestions. Growth was real, but capped by human bandwidth. A Copilot is only as fast as the person driving it.

The new wave removes the human from the loop entirely. Lovable and Replit aren't code completers—describe an app, and they write the files, configure the database, and deploy it. Manus isn't a chatbot, give it a goal like "audit these expenses," and it spins up virtual machines to do the clicking and typing for you.

Think about what that means for buyers. When a company purchases Salesforce, they're making salespeople 10% more efficient. When they purchase Manus or Lovable, they're giving every employee access to a junior engineer or analyst at a fraction of the cost of hiring one. The value proposition isn't efficiency, it's workforce multiplication.

And the numbers back it up.

Lovable hit $100M ARR with just 45 employees, roughly $2.2M in revenue per person. The product is the workforce. Manus has processed over 147 trillion tokens and spun up 80 million virtual computers since launch. These aren't tools augmenting individual productivity. They're doubling what entire teams can ship.

What's surprised observers most is the speed of enterprise adoption. Companies aren't running pilots. They're treating agent subscriptions like headcount decisions, moving through procurement at hiring speed rather than software-buying speed.

Why this matters: We're witnessing the death of the blank page. Whether it's coding (Cursor, Replit, Lovable) or general business tasks (Manus), the most valuable software today doesn't wait for you to type. It takes a prompt and delivers a finished result. The market has spoken and the most valuable feature in 2025 isn't intelligence. It's autonomy.

If you had an agent smarter than you by your side, what would you build?

Keep learning and building!

—AP