Andreessen Horowitz, together with Mercury, collected and analyzed spending from a database of over 200,000 customers for June–August 2025, identifying the top 50 startups spending on AI.
Andreessen Horowitz, together with Mercury, collected and analyzed spending from a database of over 200,000 customers for June–August 2025, identifying the top 50 startups spending on AI.
The ranking provides a real-time signal that companies are buying into AI at an early stage. The list includes platforms for vibe coding, creative tools, customer support services, and more. The ranking confirms what AI enthusiasts have long felt: AI is not only empowering specific roles (e.g., «AI for patent lawyers»), but also making individual professional skills widely available to everyone in the company.
The researchers divided the companies into horizontal (increasing overall team productivity, accessible to anyone) and vertical (sharpened for specific roles). 60% of the list is horizontal, 40% is vertical.
The most famous are LLM assistants:
1 OpenAI
2 Anthropic
12 Perplexity
30 Merlin AI
Workspaces with integrated LLMs are also emerging, such as Notion (10) and Manus (33). This means that the winner in this race is yet to be determined — it may not be a winner-takes-all market.
Another big category is AI note-takers and meeting assistants:
7 Fyxer (also writes emails)
36 Happyscribe
38 Plaude (hardware pin)
41 Otter AI
49 Read AI
And also new services like Cluely (26) with real-time feedback.
Creative tools and vibe coding are also moving horizontally: if previously only designers or engineers used them, now anyone can. The top 10 creative services include:
Freepik (#4)
ElevenLabs (#5, text-to-speech)
Canva, Photoroom, Midjourney, Descript, Opus Clip, Capcut
Arcads (#47, avatars for advertising)
Tavus (#50, multitasking)
Vertical products can either help people in their work or replace teams entirely.
Of the 17 vertical companies, 12 work as amplifiers and 5 as «AI workers» that close the end-to-end process. Among them:
27 Crosby Legal (AI law firm)
34 Cognition (AI engineer)
37 11x (automated GTM)
39 Serval (AI IT support)
42 Alma (AI for immigration law)
Popular verticals:
Support: Lorikeet (8), Customer.io (14), Ada (40), Crisp (46)
Sales/GTM: Instantly (13), Clay (25), 11x (37)
HR/Recruiting: Micro1 (9), Metaview (19), Applaud (43)
Vibe coding is entering the corporate segment and is also actively developing. Replit (3), Cursor, Lovable, and Emergent made a strong leap.
Replit is significantly ahead of Lovable in this ranking (~15x more revenue). The reason is that Replit allows you to build full-fledged corporate applications and agents, has its own services (databases, authentication, publishing), which is important for business.
About 70% of companies can start using it individually and then scale it into a team.
Many started as B2C products and are now expanding into team/enterprise solutions. Examples include Midjourney (28) and Cluely (26). This is a new era of software: products are quickly becoming universal and «drag» into business.
The study shows that AI services are now evolving faster than previous generations of software. What starts as an individual tool becomes a corporate solution within a year or two.
AI expert Alexey Minakov described the functional purpose of each service in his post. «I think this list of the top 50 AI companies/services is a good checklist to check if you haven’t missed anything in your AI stack for professional use,» he wrote .
The TOP 50 AI services that startups pay for look like this.
