The Observatory
Original visual intelligence on business, capital, artificial intelligence, property and labour. Every figure traced to a primary source and published with its data.
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- Aug 24
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America files twice as many new businesses as it did in 2019. Most of them will never hire anyone.
Business applications are up 77% in seven years. The states where they grew fastest are the states where the smallest share look like real employers.
Read the analysisWyoming filed 145 per 1,000 residents. The median state filed 16.
Business WeatherAbout Business WeatherWhere momentum is moving across 25 US metro economies. Each market scored against its own history, refreshed with the data.
Signals · August 24, 2026How a signal is chosenCandidates are generated from verified datasets, scored on nine dimensions and cut at a fixed floor. If only three clear it, three are published.
5 of 8 candidates cleared the score floor
Wyoming received 145 business applications per 1,000 residents last year. The median state received 16.
A filing rate nine times the median is not a measure of local enterprise. It is a measure of how many entities formed elsewhere choose that state's address.
Read the analysis →Wyoming has the fastest business formation growth in America (+346% since 2019) and the slowest real economic growth (+3.7%). It ranks first of 51 on both.
Removing Wyoming makes the national relationship between filings and output stronger, not weaker. A point that suppresses a correlation is not part of the same process as the rest of the data.
Read the analysis →8 states have more than doubled their business filings since 2019. Wyoming is up 346%.
Application growth responds to filing fees and registered-agent marketing as much as to enterprise, which is why the high-propensity subset is the one to watch.
Read the analysis →The ten states adding business filings fastest grew their economies by a median 18.5% since 2019. The ten adding them slowest grew 7.7%.
The cynical reading of the filing boom, that it is paperwork rather than economy, is not what the data supports outside one state.
Read the analysis →58% of American annual reports now mention artificial intelligence. In 2015 it was 0.4%.
The number of annual reports fell over the same period, so this is a change in what companies feel obliged to address rather than in how many are filing.
Read the analysis →How a signal is chosenEditorial standardsData by DFXAbout the data deskEvery dataset behind every story, downloadable as CSV or JSON, with its full lineage and the verification checks it passed. Free to reuse with attribution.
Latest
- Aug 24America files twice as many new businesses as it did in 2019. Most of them will never hire anyone.Business applications are up 77% in seven years. The states where they grew fastest are the states where the smallest share look like real employers.Small Business
- Aug 24Artificial intelligence is now in the majority of American annual reportsSeven years ago one annual report in eighteen mentioned AI. The number of annual reports barely changed. What companies feel obliged to address did.AI & Automation
- Aug 24Wyoming has the fastest business formation in America and the slowest economic growthFilings and output move together in almost every state. Removing Wyoming from the data makes the relationship stronger, which is the clearest evidence yet for what its filings actually are.Geography