The Brex Benchmark is a monthly snapshot of the top software and AI vendors by dollar spend using Brex. With 30,000+ customers spending billions of dollars on Brex, we have an inside look at the top tools driving modern business. The methodology includes Brex card and bill pay transactions. "Startups" are companies with under 250 employees, and "enterprises" are those with 250+ employees.

The AI “space race” is on, and startups are moving fast to secure capacity.

A sharp month-over-month surge in spend on Snowflake, Oracle, and Google suggests early-stage companies aren’t just testing AI tools. They’re increasingly investing in the data and compute backbone to run them.

They may be getting ahead of a demand surge that even the biggest players are scrambling to meet. Top US tech giants are pouring hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure. Amazon plans to spend over $100B this year (a 20% YoY increase), with most of it earmarked for AWS. Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns of a “tight supply environment,” and Meta is racing to build U.S. data centers for superintelligence-scale workloads.

Startups may not have billions, but they’re making similar moves: securing compute and building data pipelines now. With startup spend on Anthropic also surging (+275% MoM), the stakes to scale AI are skyrocketing. This makes the 2023 Nvidia GPU rush look like just the tip of the AI iceberg. Now, it's a full-on “space race” to lock in AI capacity so it doesn’t become a billion-dollar bottleneck.

More than half of startups’ AI spending is on Anthropic.

Anthropic spending among startups increased 275% MoM and accounted for more than half of overall startup AI spending in July, suggesting a clear shift away from OpenAI, which fell 23% MoM. Startups continue to build around Anthropic’s Claude for its quality, pricing, and developer friendliness. OpenAI remains the top AI vendor for enterprises.

Other takeaways:

• Cursor spend was up 9% MoM among startups, continuing a multi-month streak of steady growth. The developer darling continues to be a top-3 tool in startups as well as enterprises.
• Is the TikTok effect taking over enterprise? Descript, a platform for collaborative editing of video, audio, and transcripts, joined the enterprise top-10 after a 157% MoM spend increase. With Runway up two spots, large companies signal renewed interest in AI-native post-production tools.

Startups are moving fast on cloud and compute.

Across the SaaS leaderboard, early-stage companies are shifting spend toward foundational tools like cloud and data infrastructure for their AI-led businesses. Snowflake and Oracle joined the startup top-10 with a 2x and 3x increase in MoM spend, respectively, while Google spend rose 26% MoM.

It’s clear startups are taking market cues seriously — McKinsey estimates it will take $3 trillion in new data center investment to meet global AI demand, with large investments in data and compute layers.

Other notable trends:

• Shopify dropped spots in both segments, suggesting a pullback in ecommerce spend as startups shift focus from external growth to AI tooling and internal ops.
• Enterprises ramped up Carta spend, potentially signaling a warming of the IPO pipeline or secondary sales.
• Despite Figma’s in startups, enterprises remain loyal to Adobe’s suite of products, with spend up ~10% MoM. But for how long?

Sumeet Marwaha is the Head of Data at Brex, supporting Brex in understanding how customers spend, adopt tools, and grow their businesses.

All analysis conducted for this report that uses Brex internal customer data is anonymized and aggregated for privacy. To learn more about how we use data in anonymized or aggregated form for these trend reports, email us at privacy@brex.com.