# Brex Benchmark: Top 25 Fastest Growing Startups of Fall 2026

Spring’s trend was abstraction, and summer’s was the stack underneath it. This fall it is the chips and the tools that power autonomous AI agents.

**URL Source:** https://www.brex.com/journal/brex-benchmark-articles/brex-benchmark-top-25-fastest-growing-startups-fall-2026

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Brex Benchmark

Fall 2026’s top 25 fastest-growing software vendors

_Spring’s trend was abstraction, and summer’s was the stack underneath it. This fall it is the chips and the tools that power autonomous AI agents._

Every season, Brex ranks the software vendors whose spending from Brex customers is growing fastest. This fall, much of that spending is going to companies that give AI agents a place to work.

The underlying AI model itself (the core foundational intelligence powering the software) is only part of what an agent costs. An agent is essentially a model that is allowed to act, and the acting (running code, running tests, reading a web page) happens on ordinary computers rented by the second from a different company for each job. Reflecting the trends driving this season's rankings, companies on Brex that buy a coding agent rent one of those computers within six months at sixteen times the rate of comparable companies, the share of GPU buyers also renting one went from 12% to 29% in two years, and 31% of companies paying for a coding agent now also pay for a tool that reads the web for it. Those are the vendors climbing the list, and every figure here counts companies, not dollars.

Below is a look at the top 25 fastest-growing vendors for the fall capturing this momentum.

**The top 25 trending software vendors (fall 2026)**

![Fall 2026’s top 25 fastest-growing software vendors](https://brand.brex.com/transform/a862ff93-ce22-4db8-8f3e-072a7e76a345/Fall-Top-25-Software-vendors-BLOG-0)

*Ranked by spend growth across tens of thousands of Brex customers' card and bill pay activity, recency-weighted. Jul-Sep 2026 against Apr-Jun 2026. Tags mark the eight vendors that rent compute: Modal and Prime Intellect rent both kinds. Source: Brex data*

_The ranking orders vendors by how fast Brex customers’ spending on them is growing, weighted toward recent months. Any vendor that is publicly traded, valued above $30B, or reporting more than $1B in annual recurring revenue graduates off the list, along with subsidiaries of companies that clear those bars, which is why Cursor, now part of SpaceX, and the closed-model labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, are not on it. The ranking is built from real Brex card and bill pay activity across thousands of Brex customers._

Baseten (#1) runs models on GPUs. The vendors right behind it sell the places where agents act: Modal (#2) and Daytona (#4) sell sandboxes, isolated machines where an agent can run code without touching anything real; Blacksmith (#6) sells the machines that test that code; Render (#13) runs the finished apps.  


**Trend 1: The GPU makes the model. The CPU runs the agent.**

![One loop, two chips](https://brand.brex.com/transform/1a6ce2a2-2deb-4c38-aa22-dcad788c79a2/Fall-Top-25-Software-vendors-BLOG-1)

*Numbers are fall 2026 Brex Benchmark ranks. Review ends with a model call; the rest of it is CPU work. Source: Brex Benchmark fall 2026*

An AI agent works in a loop: it reads a task, tries something, checks the result, and decides what to do next. The deciding happens in the AI model, which runs on a GPU. The doing, like copying code and running tests, happens on ordinary computers built around CPUs. For each task the agent rents a temporary, isolated computer called a sandbox, and it can do this hundreds of times a day.

Buy the agent, rent the machine. On Brex, companies follow the same order: they pay for the agent first, then start renting the computers. Within six months of their first payment to a coding agent (Cursor, Cognition, Amp, Replit, Lovable or Windsurf, between January 2025 and March 2026), one in six companies started paying for a sandbox, a testing service or hosting for the first time, and half did it within eight weeks.

That is well above the norm. Compared with companies of the same age on Brex and the same spending that never bought a coding agent, first-time coding-agent buyers were about six times as likely to add one of these services within six months (13.7% versus 2.3%) and about sixteen times as likely to add a sandbox or testing service (3.3% versus 0.2%). These are counts of companies, not dollars. When a company pays for both, it bought the agent first four times in five.

![Buy the agent, rent the machine](https://brand.brex.com/transform/f1a1c5c9-1fbb-4bf6-a580-5edd94731522/Fall-Top-25-Software-vendors-BLOG-2)

*Companies whose first coding-agent charge (Cursor, Cognition, Amp, Replit, Lovable or Windsurf) landed Jan 2025 to Mar 2026, against companies of the same age and spend that never bought one. Counts of companies, not dollars. Source: Brex data*

Companies that already pay for GPUs are adding the same rented computers. In 2024, 12% of them also paid for a sandbox or testing service, rising to 20% in 2025 and 29% so far in 2026. And nearly all of this year's first-time sandbox or testing buyers, 97%, were already paying OpenAI, Anthropic or a GPU vendor.

![GPU buyers now rent CPU machines too:
12% to 29% in two years](https://brand.brex.com/transform/7c71d0c3-74d5-433e-8264-6d04ce04b6d2/Fall-Top-25-Software-vendors-BLOG-3)

*Share of companies paying for GPU compute on Brex each year that also paid a sandbox or Cl vendor that year. Counts of companies, not dollars. 2026 runs through September. Source: Brex data*

Since early 2024, spend on GPUs is up about 15x on Brex, against 10x for CPU execution, and the ranking holds with each vendor's largest customer set aside and with Vercel removed. The CPU bill is broader: on Brex, more than three times as many companies pay for CPU execution as for GPU compute, and the typical monthly bill in both groups held flat or fell, so the growth is new companies arriving rather than bigger bills. Card and bill pay see what startups buy for themselves, not enterprise contracts, so this is a census of the startup layer, where new tools get chosen.

![The GPU bill grew faster.
The CPU bill is broader.](https://brand.brex.com/transform/09e875f3-996b-45b1-918e-e615f0660974/Fall-Top-25-Software-vendors-BLOG-4)

*Spend on Brex, 2024Q1 = 100, with each vendor's largest customer removed. GPU compute: GPU clouds and inference providers. CPU execution: sandboxes, CI, hosting and browser infrastructure (without Vercel it ends at 1,145). Three times as many companies pay the CPU side. Source: Brex data*

**Trend 2: The web, re-sold to agents**

An agent also needs to read documentation and other web pages, and websites are built for people, not software. An agent cannot click around a page, so it needs the information delivered as clean text with the source attached, often many times per task. A new group of vendors sells that, and Parallel (#20) is the newest.

Among companies that pay OpenAI or Anthropic, the share also paying for this kind of web access rose from 7% in 2023 to 19% in 2026, and 31% of companies paying for a coding agent now pay for a tool that reads the web for it. New buyers are choosing different tools, too. In 2023, one in forty started with a tool built for agents, like Firecrawl, Exa or Browserbase, compared with one in four in 2024 and more than half in 2025 and 2026. These figures count companies, not dollars, and the older web-scraping tools still bring in more money.

![The web, re-sold to agents:
4 buyers per 100 old-scraper buyers, now 105](https://brand.brex.com/transform/38c20ebd-d019-4f63-8786-2a2483578db0/Fall-Top-25-Software-vendors-BLOG-5)

*Agent-era web tools: Parallel, Firecrawl, Exa, Tavily, Browserbase and peers. Older scrapers and proxy networks: Bright Data, Apify, SerpApi and peers. Counts of companies, not dollars, 2024Q1 to 2026Q3. Source: Brex data*

**The agent’s bill is now a multi-layered cloud bill**

The agent's loop runs straight through the list. It reads the documentation through Parallel, a model on Baseten decides the fix, a sandbox from Modal runs it, and tools like Blacksmith and Greptile test and review it. Every one of those steps is paid for by the second.

The trend to watch this winter is a change on the GPU side. Baseten's spend on Brex more than quadrupled quarter over quarter, which fits companies moving from paying for a model by how much they use it to running their own models on GPUs set aside for them. If the pattern of the last two years holds, more than a third of companies paying for GPUs on Brex will also be renting ordinary computers by spring. Winter's Benchmark will measure both.

_All analysis conducted for this report that uses Brex internal customer data is anonymized and aggregated for privacy. Brex is a customer of Hex and Greptile, two vendors on this list. The ranking is mechanical and neither relationship affected it. To learn more about how we use data in anonymized or aggregated form for these trend reports, email us at [privacy@brex.com](#)._

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