A new a16z report looks at which AI companies startups are actually paying for

Summary

On Thursday, Andreessen Horowitz released its first AI Spending Report in partnership with the fintech firm Mercury. Using transaction data from Mercury, the report analyzes the top 50 AI-native application layer companies that startups are spending money on, similar to the previously published Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps. a16z partners Olivia Moore and Seema Amble say the data shows companies are still adopting a range of different AI products for certain tasks — and new apps are rising and falling very quickly. “There’s a proliferation of tools,” Amble said. “It hasn’t just coalesced around one or two in each category.” The report also shows a lot of spending on “human augmentors” or “copilots” that can help boost productivity among the workforce, suggesting startups aren’t ready to fully shift into agentic workflows. “As computer use becomes more of a mode and there’s more of the ability for there to be end-to-end agentic flows built, I think that shift will happen, where we’ll see fewer copilots and more end-to-end agent tools,” Amble said. “Especially as people are really eager to give them a try.” Image Credits:a16z Unsurprisingly, the top of the list was dominated by major labs, with OpenAI taking the top slot and Anthropic following up at number 2. Vibe-coding tools were also well represented, with Replit at number 3, Lovable at number 18. Cursor landed at number 6, and Emergent at number 48. Cognition, which operates more enterprise-oriented coding tools like Devin and Windsurf, was at number 34. When a16z produced a similar list for consumer habits, Lovable ranked much higher than Replit on pure traffic alone because a lot of people were using it to create projects. But startups are not spending as much money on Lovable as they are on Replit, in part because of the lack of enterprise features. But the variety of companies on the list seems to suggest there’s room for plenty of different companies at once. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 20...