No VC Funds, No Employees: Meet the Norwegian Techie Who Founded 24 AI Start-Ups at Once

While entrepreneurs are going big on developing their own artificial intelligence models to lead the global AI race, a Norwegian techie has pushed the boundaries of innovation and founded 24 AI start-ups simultaneously. John Rush, in a LinkedIn post, claims to have about half a million b2b users and multimillion annual recurring revenue (ARR) through these start-ups.

And the most interesting part about building 24 AI start-ups at the same time is Rush’s unconventional approach. The techie stated that he did not rely on VC funding, employees, calls, offices, or managers to execute his plan. Instead, he operates entirely asynchronously over chat.

His AI platforms include unicornplatform.com, seobotai.com, listingbott.com, indexrusher.com, devhunt.org, countvisits.com, filmgrail,com, wrapfai.com, and more.

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Rush handles idea generation, design, UX and marketing for his start-ups. On the other hand, his co-maker takes care of coding, product development and support.

Previously, the Norwegian techie had spent a decade in VC-backed space, start-up accelerators, conferences, meetings, scrums. After this, he decided to do a “hard pivot”. In 2023, he started his own bootstrapped journey to build an automated organisation to democratise start-ups.

“I wanted to build a set of tools and AI agents so that anyone with an idea, passion, and discipline could use them to compete with VC-backed corporations while being independent. It was unfair to see only people living in a handful of western cities playing the game,” he said.

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At that time, Rush said his plan was to build tools for ideation, formation, operation, coding, and marketing. Since then, the techie has been working on 24 AI start-ups altogether. He also has 23 more projects lined up in the same field.

His planned AI projects include uptime bot, osssoftware directory, loadtester, roadmap board, headless cms, auth api, resize api, ai proofreader, users-mentioned-me, simple hosting, solo crm, startagen, etc.