One's company: AI-enabled one-person startups booming

BEIJING, May 28 (Xinhua) -- At 9 a.m. in the Chengdu Tianfu Software Park in southwest China's Sichuan Province, Huang Feng pushes open the glass door and walks toward his workstation, an open booth of less than two square meters.

A former creative director at an advertising agency, his business card now reads the title of "Founder." The company has just one employee -- himself.

Huang is part of a booming number of One-Person Companies (OPCs), a new form of startup enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) given targeted support by Chinese authorities.

His firm focuses on "embodied bamboo," using the material as a core medium to create smart toys and digital art with emotional interaction capabilities.

"I've worked in creative fields for over a decade -- art, design, digital installations," Huang said as he displays a bamboo-made flapping-wing prototype on his computer. "Now I'm starting out alone. It's what we call an OPC."

Unlike traditional ventures, an OPC is usually led by a single core founder who -- with the help of AI tools, a handful of supporting staff or outsourcing -- handles design, R&D, marketing and operations. The result, as its proponents put it, is "one person running an entire company."

The model is gaining traction across China. As of June 2025, the number of one-person limited liability companies in the country had exceeded 16 million, with new registrations in the first half of 2025 surging 47 percent year-on-year, according to industry reports.

The trend is most visible in the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and emerging industrial cities in central and western China, where OPCs are concentrated in light-asset, high-intellect and new-business sectors. The vast majority of founders were born post-1990s and post-2000s.

In the Lin-gang Special Area of China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone, the local authorities launched its OPC initiative in August 2025, unveiling the Zero Cube community -- a space offering complimentary office and residential accommodations. Within five months, the community has already attracted more than 150 startup teams.

Chen Zishun joined the community to run a cross-border live-streaming venture. Four months after moving in, his company successfully turned a blanket into a best-selling product in the Japanese market, achieving sales of more than 5 million yuan (about 733,000 U.S. dollars) in the fourth quarter of 2025.

"We rank first in Japan's home textile and furnishing category on TikTok and we basically create a hit product every other week," Chen said.

In March, Lin-gang Special Area released a set of targeted measures to further foster the OPC growth, including rent-free office space for up to three years, subsidies covering a maximum of 80 percent of AI tool service costs, and up to 3 million yuan in investment per project per round through the Youth Innovation Fund.

In an AI community of Zhongguancun, Beijing's tech hub, Su Kui, a post-80s OPC founder and graduate of Peking University with previous experience at major tech firms, developed an "AI-plus-animation" creation tool.

In less than a year, it has gained more than 6,000 registered users worldwide. With its differentiated AI configuration, the product has held its own against competitors from Japan and the United States and has entered the paid-use stage.

The OPC model, centered on "one person plus AI," is fast becoming a new frontier where digital economy and innovation-driven entrepreneurship converge.

"One-person companies break the constraints of traditional employment and provide a low-cost entry point for talented individuals," said Liu Yiming, associate professor of economics at Shandong University.

"They allow professionals, freelancers and fresh college graduates to turn their skills into business value without large upfront capital, making the shift from being an employee to being an entrepreneur more easily," Liu said.

The emergence of OPCs in many parts of China is no accident. It is driven by the spread of AI technologies, targeted policy support and platforms, and a solid pool of talent combining technical expertise with specialized knowledge.

On March 16, Guangdong Province issued an action plan to support AI-powered OPC innovation -- the first provincial-level policy package of its kind in China. It aims to cultivate 1,000 benchmark AI OPCs by 2028 and turn Guangdong into a national leader in the field.

Other regions are also moving quickly. Since January 2026, more than 10 localities in the Yangtze River Delta alone, including Lin-gang, Hangzhou's Shangcheng District and Hefei High-Tech Zone, have rolled out OPC support policies.

Despite the strong momentum, "lonely founders" still face challenges that include cost pressures, lack of resource support and high risks of going under.

Industry insiders say tackling these bottlenecks and unleashing the innovative potential of OPCs requires coordinated efforts from the government, platforms and society to build a comprehensive support system.

"A supportive platform and a conducive innovation environment are critical," says Wang Xiyu, founder of Shanghai-based MemoTalk, an AI recording and summarization device.

"We once ran into a technical hurdle with a software development kit. But thanks to the favorable local innovation climate, we met a team upstairs at the community ball court and solved the problem through community-based collaboration," Wang said.

Some regions are also experimenting with ways to lower costs. In Shanghai's Pudong New Area, newly-registered OPCs are eligible for free computing resources worth up to 300,000 yuan, along with startup funding and other support, in an effort to create a low-cost, high-density environment for intellectual entrepreneurship.