How many indie startups are in the Startup Spotlight directory?

As of May 24, 2026, the Startup Spotlight directory tracks 443 active indie startups across 10 categories. The directory grows continuously as founders submit new listings.

Which category has the most indie startups?

Other is the largest category in the directory with 100 startups (23% of total).

What percentage of indie startups are solo-founder or small-team?

30% of startups in the directory report a team size of 1–10, which is the indie/solo-founder cohort. Larger teams represent the remaining 70%.

Live data · 2026-05-24

Indie Startup Statistics 2026

Name: Startup Spotlight — Indie Startup Directory Statistics (2026)
Creator: Startup Spotlight
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

A live snapshot of the indie startup landscape, drawn from the 443active startups in the Startup Spotlight directory. Numbers update on every request — what you see is what's true right now, as of May 24, 2026.

Active startups

443

across the full directory

Unique founders

282

1.57 startups per founder on average

Pro listings

134

30% of the directory

Solo / small teams

30%

report team size of 1–10

Added last 30d

317

new submissions

Categories tracked

across the directory

Startups by category

Other leads the directory with 100 startups (23% of the total). Second is AI / ML (69).

Founded year cohort

Distribution of when listed founders self-report their startup was founded. The 2024 cohort is the largest with 8 startups.

Team-size distribution

The vast majority of listed startups report a team of 1–10 — confirming the directory's indie/solo-founder positioning. 30% are in this band.

1-10

131 · 29.6%

11-50

65 · 14.7%

51-200

46 · 10.4%

500+

38 · 8.6%

201-500

27 · 6.1%

How these stats are computed

Source: every active startup in the Startup Spotlight directory at request time.
Counts exclude pending, rejected, and unverified listings.
Founder count is deduped by Twitter handle, then GitHub handle, then name.
Team-size and founded-year are founder-reported during submission.
The page is dynamically rendered — the numbers above are accurate as of the moment you loaded this page.

Cite or reuse this data

This page is published under CC-BY 4.0. Cite as: "Startup Spotlight indie startup statistics, 2026-05-24", https://startupspotlight.co/stats.

For machine-readable access to the underlying directory data, see /llms-full.txt.

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