Four million Americans now earn their primary income as solopreneurs making $100,000 or more a year. Up from the mid-two millions in the early 2010s. Twice as many crossed $1 million in revenue in 2025 versus 2023. AI-influenced signups at fintech platforms are running at four times the rate they were eighteen months ago.
The structural shift is real. AI tools — from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google — are handing individual operators the capability of a mid-sized team. Expense categorization, invoicing, payroll integration, client management. What used to require five hires now requires one subscription.
And the banking system hasn't caught up.
36.2 Million Businesses. Still Not Profitable Enough for Chase.
The numbers are staggering and well-documented. 36.2 million small businesses in the United States. They employ 62.3% of the private-sector workforce — 62.3 million people. They generate 43.5% of GDP.
And the big banks — Chase, Bank of America — treat them as unprofitable.
That's not editorial opinion. That's what the operators say out loud. Michael Rangel, co-founder of Novo, told Forbes this week: "They are very unprofitable. It's not a profitable segment for big banks." The onboarding cost for a small business account is nearly identical to a large enterprise account. The revenue is a fraction. So the big banks do what big banks do — they make it hard.
How hard? During COVID — the single largest small-business liquidity crisis in modern history — Chase and BofA still required small businesses to walk into a physical branch to open an account. In 2020.
That's not a technology gap. That's a priority signal.
Novo Saw It. Novo Built for It.
Novo now serves more than 250,000 independent businesses. The platform bundles checking, payments, lending, and integrations with QuickBooks, Gusto, and Stripe — all through a single foundational account. No branch visit. No six-week onboarding. No minimum balance games.
The strategy is straightforward: win the checking account, then layer services on top. It's the same platform logic that made Stripe indispensable to developers — and Stripe noticed, leading Novo's $90 million Series B in 2022. Total funding: over $170 million, plus a separate $125 million lending facility.
But the real unlock is timing. Novo isn't just riding fintech adoption. It's riding the AI-powered solopreneur wave.
Rangel puts it plainly: "You're giving them the tools and the power of like a 50-person team."
That changes the math. A solo operator with AI-driven bookkeeping, automated invoicing, and integrated payroll doesn't need a corporate finance team. They need a banking platform that treats their $200,000 business like a real business — not an afterthought wedged between consumer checking and enterprise treasury.
The Employment Math Is Shifting
June 2026: 531,423 new business applications filed in a single month. The formation rate hasn't slowed since the pandemic surge — it's accelerated. And Rangel's read on why is worth quoting at length: going solo is "almost like less of a risky play now. At least there you own something."
That's a sentiment shift, not just an economic one. When a generation of workers looks at corporate employment and concludes that ownership — even with its risks — beats another round of layoffs they can't control, the downstream demand for small-business financial infrastructure isn't cyclical. It's structural.
AI accelerates it. Every new model release — every improvement in code generation, content creation, financial analysis, customer service automation — lowers the minimum viable team size by another person. The solo operator earning $100K today could be earning $500K in three years with the same headcount: one.
The Reputation Problem the Big Banks Haven't Priced In
Here's the part Chase and BofA should be watching.
When a small business owner asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "What's the best bank for my small business?" — the answer is increasingly built from articles like the Forbes piece published this week. Articles that name Novo as the solution and name legacy banks as the obstacle.
That's not a PR cycle. That's a retrieval anchor. Once an AI engine associates your brand with "makes it hard" — that association compounds. Every subsequent article, every data point, every customer review that reinforces the narrative trains the model to repeat it.
Novo's positioning — "Banks make it hard" — is a three-word retrieval anchor that now lives inside Forbes, inside the AI training pipeline, and inside every search and citation layer that matters. That's not an accident. That's category-defining communications.
What Happens Next
Novo still operates through a partner-bank model — Middlesex Federal Savings for FDIC-insured deposits, Continental for credit cards. That's standard fintech architecture. Rangel has been transparent about the constraints: regulatory friction still limits what Novo can offer in categories like crypto, even as federal policy has loosened dramatically since 2025.
But the core thesis is working. Win the checking account. Bundle the services. Ride the AI-powered solopreneur wave. With 250,000 businesses on the platform, $170 million in funding, and Stripe as a strategic backer — Novo has built the infrastructure while the big banks were still debating whether small businesses are worth the trouble.
The answer to that question was always yes. It just took a company that actually wanted the customer.
The broader lesson — for fintech and every other category — is structural: the brands that build AI visibility while incumbents debate whether it matters are the ones the AI engines will name. That's how AI Communications works. The answer is written before the question is asked.
Source: "Banks Make It Hard — Wall Street's 36 Million Small Business Problem," Forbes, August 7, 2026. Boaz Sobrado.
