What Aiolum is

Aiolum is a public record of businesses that one person, or a team of 2 to 10 people, grew with AI. It holds 252 stories from 76 countries: 125 built by a solo founder, 35 sold to a buyer, and US$261M in verified outcomes in total. Every revenue number, user count and sale price carries an evidence grade, so a reader can see at once whether a public company disclosed it, a journalist confirmed it, or only the founder said it. Since October 2026 the site also carries reported stories, grade D: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source. They are marked "Reported, not verified" on every card, and their numbers are not counted in the verified total.

The site exists because most online success stories are founder claims, and most of them exist to sell a course. Here the 781 grade-A facts are separated from the claims, and each story is paired with the failed startups that promised the same thing before it, drawn from Loot Drop, a free database of 1,749 dead startups. Credit for that record goes to Loot Drop; each failed company links to its entry there. The method page explains the four grades and the five parts of every story.

No business paid to be listed. The stories are chosen for public evidence, not for fame, and a story stays on the site when its famous number turns out to be wrong: it is then marked as a cautionary story.

The data files and the story texts may be reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes under the Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license. For commercial use, ask first.

The data is free to reuse. stories.json holds all 252 stories with a field guide, tools.json holds the 855 tools named in their sources, every story also exists as Markdown at the same address with a .md ending, and llms.txt lists everything for AI agents. The Tools page shows what these businesses run on.