Growth That Keeps Getting Faster

There’s a pattern emerging among the hottest AI startups right now. It’s not just that their revenue is climbing. It’s that the climb itself is speeding up. The time between major revenue milestones is shrinking — sometimes dramatically.

A cluster of companies, from young model-makers to older software firms that added AI features, have publicly reported what looks like a classic flywheel effect. Once they cross a certain threshold, the next one comes much faster.

One important caveat: not everyone defines ARR the same way. Some use annualized recurring revenue (contracts signed but not yet billed). Others report an annualized run rate based on the most recent month’s numbers. Gusto, for its part, uses actual trailing 12-month revenue. So direct comparisons are tricky. Still, the direction is unmistakable: up, and accelerating.

Here are the companies that have shared their numbers publicly, listed in reverse order of when they announced their latest milestone.

Mercor: From $1B to $2B in Four Months

Mercor is barely three years old. On Monday, co-founder and CEO Brendan Foody announced the company had crossed $2 billion in gross annualized revenue as of June. That milestone came just four months after hitting $1 billion. In September, the firm — which hires domain experts to train and refine AI models — had already reached a $500 million run rate.

The pace is staggering. Doubling from $1 billion to $2 billion in a third of a year is the kind of growth most startups only dream of. Mercor is proving that the demand for human-in-the-loop AI training is still red-hot.

Anthropic: The Velocity That Stunned the Industry

Few companies have generated as much buzz for revenue speed as Anthropic. In late May, the model maker announced it had crossed $47 billion in revenue run rate. That came less than two months after it reported surpassing $30 billion. To put that in perspective: the company said it reached a $9 billion run rate in late 2025, up from $4 billion in July of the same year.

Anthropic’s growth curve is so steep it has mesmerized the entire AI sector. The company is effectively doubling its run rate in a matter of weeks. That’s not normal — even by Silicon Valley standards.

Sierra: Doubling Down on Enterprise AI Agents

Sierra builds customer service AI agents for large enterprises. Co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor announced in late May that the company reached its first $100 million in ARR in seven quarters. Then it took just two more quarters to add another $100 million.

That acceleration — seven quarters to hit $100M, then two to hit $200M — shows that enterprise buyers are not just dipping their toes into AI customer service. They’re diving in headfirst.

Glean: Cutting the Double Time in Half

Enterprise AI search startup Glean has been around for seven years, but its growth is only getting faster. In May, the company announced it had crossed $300 million in ARR. It took nine months to grow from $100 million to $200 million. It took just six months to go from $200 million to $300 million.

That’s a 33% reduction in the time needed to add $100 million. For a company that’s been in the market for years, not months, that kind of acceleration signals that the product-market fit is deepening, not plateauing.

Gusto: The Old Dog Learning New AI Tricks

Gusto is the veteran of this list. The 14-year-old HR tech startup, last valued at $9.3 billion in early 2022, announced in May that its revenue accelerated in each of the last five quarters. It also surpassed $1 billion in trailing 12-month revenue.

Gusto’s surge proves that you don’t have to be born an AI company to benefit from the boom. By integrating AI into its payroll and benefits platform, the company has reignited its top-line growth. It’s a reminder that incumbents can still sprint if they adopt the right technology.

Clio: Legal Software Gets an AI Boost

Clio has been providing legal practice management software for 18 years. After embedding AI into its offering in 2023, the company’s revenue took off. It surpassed $200 million in ARR in mid-2024, doubled that figure by late last year, and recently announced that ARR had reached $500 million.

That’s a 2.5x increase in roughly 18 months. For an 18-year-old company, that kind of acceleration is rare. Clio shows that even mature markets like legal tech can be disrupted — or at least supercharged — by AI.

What This Tells Us About the AI Market

The common thread across these companies is that AI is not a one-time boost. It’s creating a compounding effect. Early adopters validate the product, which improves the model, which attracts more customers, which generates more data, which makes the product better. That flywheel is spinning faster than ever.

Of course, these are the winners — the ones willing to share their numbers. Many more AI startups are growing quickly but staying quiet. And fast growth doesn’t guarantee profitability or long-term survival. But for now, the revenue acceleration across AI-native and AI-enhanced companies is hard to ignore.

If you’re tracking which startups to watch, these names are setting the pace.

Google has quietly switched on a new Google Meet Gemini notes feature that does exactly what the name suggests: it takes notes for you. But there’s a catch — you’ll need to pay the monthly AI subscription fee, which starts at $19.99.

The feature, called “Take notes for me,” is rolling out now to subscribers of Gemini AI Pro and Gemini AI Ultra, plus eligible Google Workspace business accounts. For personal users, that means shelling out at least $20 a month in the US to get AI-generated meeting summaries.

How the note-taking actually works

Once you enable the feature during a Google Meet call, Gemini runs in the background. It transcribes the conversation in real time and then distills everything into a summary with key action items. No more frantically scribbling down who said what.

The notes are automatically saved as a Google Doc in your Drive. After the call ends, Google sends you an email recap with the summary and next steps. That’s it — no extra clicking, no manual saving.

Starting and controlling the feature

To kick off note-taking during a call, click the pencil icon at the top of the Meet window. You can also set it to run automatically on every call by toggling it on in Meet settings under Meeting records.

Google says all meeting participants will be notified when note-taking is active. That’s an important privacy touch — nobody wants to discover later that an AI was quietly transcribing the entire conversation without their knowledge.

What you actually get for $20 a month

The output includes meeting summaries, action items, and searchable notes. If you’ve ever sat through a two-hour status update or a meandering brainstorming session, you can see the appeal. Instead of rewatching a recording or digging through chat logs, you get a clean, structured recap.

But here’s the thing: this isn’t a free perk. It’s part of Google’s broader push to stuff Gemini into Workspace, and it follows the same playbook as every other AI assistant these days. The core productivity tools are useful, yes, but they live behind a monthly paywall.

Still behind the paywall — the $20 AI tax

Google has been aggressively embedding Gemini into its productivity suite for months. AI meeting tools are quickly becoming standard across the industry — Microsoft has Copilot, Zoom has its AI Companion, and now Google has Gemini. But the story is the same everywhere: you have to pay.

For Google Meet regulars — people who spend hours each week in video calls — the $20 monthly subscription might make sense. It’s cheaper than a virtual assistant, and it saves time. But for casual users, it’s a steep ask.

The feature itself is solid. It transcribes accurately, organizes notes well, and integrates directly with Drive. But it’s not a revolutionary update. It’s a convenience, not a game-changer (to borrow a phrase we try to avoid).

Who should consider subscribing

If you’re a project manager, a consultant, or anyone who lives in Google Meet, the Google Meet Gemini notes feature could genuinely improve your workflow. Instead of taking notes during a call, you can focus on the conversation. The AI handles the admin.

If you only join a handful of meetings a month, it’s probably not worth the subscription. You can always take your own notes, or use one of the free transcription tools available elsewhere.

Either way, Google is betting that enough people will pay the AI tax to make this a profitable addition. For now, it’s a neat tool — if you’re willing to open your wallet.

Apple’s latest iOS beta brings a generative fill tool to the Photos app — but is it any good?

When Apple announced the iOS 27 Extend feature at WWDC, I was skeptical. Generative image expansion has been available on Google Pixel phones and through third-party apps for a while, but Apple tends to wait until it can polish a feature before shipping it. After spending several days with the developer beta on an iPhone 17, I can say the tool is genuinely useful — even if it sometimes produces results that look like they wandered out of a dream sequence.

The Photos app overhaul includes three marquee additions: an improved Clean Up tool, Spatial Reframing for spatial video, and the Extend feature. Extend is the headliner — it lets you expand any photo beyond its original boundaries, with Apple Intelligence filling in the missing pixels. I threw everything I could at it: selfies, food shots, portraits taken with a Nikon mirrorless, and casual indoor snaps. Here’s what I learned.

How the Extend tool actually works

Using the feature is straightforward. Open a photo in the Photos app, tap the hamburger menu at the bottom, select Tools, then choose Extend. You can pinch to zoom out, reposition the frame, and drag the edges to any aspect ratio you want. The tool takes about 10 to 15 seconds to generate the expanded image — fast enough that you won’t get impatient.

One smart design choice: Apple baked Extend directly into the Crop tool. If you’re already cropping a photo, just pinch outward beyond the original frame, and the Extend option appears at the bottom of the screen. It feels natural, like the feature was always meant to be there.

Where the AI stumbles — and stumbles hard

Not every result is a winner. In fact, some are downright weird.

I tested Extend on a photo of a mango pastry on a café table. The original frame showed just the pastry and a plastic spoon. After expansion, the AI added a second pastry that never existed, a blurry person in the background, and an extra plate edge on the left. The spoon extension looked convincing; everything else screamed “AI hallucination.”

Another test: I shrank a café interior shot to the center of the frame and let Extend fill all four sides. The tables and chairs at the top turned soft and dreamlike. Gray and black bags lost their definition. Plates on the left shifted in color. It’s the kind of result that looks fine at a glance but falls apart under scrutiny.

I sent one particularly goofy expanded photo — a flower shot extended in all directions — to four friends. Only one thought it was real. The other three spotted the AI artifacts immediately: weird shrubs, a floating flower, leaves that seemed to grow from nowhere.

Some expansion directions are blocked

Extend occasionally refuses to expand in certain directions. I couldn’t figure out a consistent pattern. In some cases, a human subject sat near the edge where I wanted to expand, so that might be a deliberate safety restriction. But other denials had no obvious explanation. The feature also requires an active internet connection — it won’t work offline or over a slow Wi-Fi network, which limits its usefulness on a plane or in a remote area.

But when it works, it’s surprisingly good

For all its quirks, the iOS 27 Extend feature delivers genuinely impressive results often enough to make it worth using.

I tested it on a portrait of a friend taken with a Nikon mirrorless camera at a birthday party in May. The original composition was tight; I expanded the frame to give her more breathing room. The AI filled in shrubs and grass at the bottom left — the texture isn’t perfect, but she couldn’t tell the difference. The tree silhouette and foreground plants came out clean. Only the leaves at the top gave away the trick.

Another strong result: a photo taken at a café with a blurred stranger in the background and reflections in a mirror. Extend preserved the shallow depth of field perfectly, keeping the background person appropriately soft while maintaining the mirror reflections. It’s the kind of subtle edit that would take minutes in Photoshop.

My favorite Extend edit so far

The best result came from a landscape shot of a water bed with mountains in the distance. Extend filled in the water texture to the left, added a canopy stand on the right, and extended the mountain range convincingly. It did add a car that wasn’t there and made my arm look slightly odd, but for a social media post, it’s more than good enough.

An indoor birthday shot also turned out well. The AI added a gift box at the bottom, a lamp on the left, a door on the right, and a partially visible chair behind me — none of which existed in the original. It even bent the ceiling slightly to mimic a wide-angle lens effect, which was either a happy accident or a surprisingly sophisticated touch.

Is the Extend feature worth using?

After a week of testing, I’d say the iOS 27 Extend feature is a solid addition to Apple’s AI toolkit. It’s not flawless — you’ll still get artifacts, especially with complex textures or multiple subjects. But the best results are good enough that you’d need to pixel-hunt to spot the fakery.

Apple marks edited photos with a tag in the metadata (swipe up in the Photos app to see it), which is a nice transparency touch. The feature is best for casual edits: adding a bit of breathing room to a tight portrait, turning a vertical shot into a horizontal one for Instagram, or simulating an ultrawide perspective when you didn’t have the right lens.

Would I trust it for professional work? Not yet. But for everyday use, it’s already more useful than I expected. And for a first-gen beta feature, that’s saying something.