Every month, our customers spend billions of dollars on Brex. We're excited to share with you a glimpse into how they’re spending that money with The Brex Benchmark, a monthly snapshot of the top software and AI vendors by dollar spend on Brex, as well as overall SaaS and AI adoption rates across the Brex ecosystem.

The goal of The Brex Benchmark is to help you understand where startups, enterprises, and other high-growth companies are investing in their technology stacks in 2025 and beyond. You can look forward to refreshed data charts with new trends and insights every month.

You’ll notice we’ve broken out AI tools from SaaS tools, and that’s for two reasons: 1. to better track the defining technology shift of our era, and 2. credit-based pricing models make AI spending patterns look different from traditional software since costs scale directly with usage.

From industry-standard SaaS products like Google and Twilio to emerging AI code and design tools like Cursor and Runway, here's an inside look at which vendors Brex customers are using to build the future faster.

Note: We'll define "startups" as companies with under 250 employees and "enterprises" as those with 250+ employees.

Top AI vendors

Anthropic leads AI spending among startups — more than 2x OpenAI spending in May — and suggests Claude is the foundational model of choice for startups building with AI. However, OpenAI outpaced Anthropic spending by 4x in the enterprise, potentially reflective of OpenAI's longer market presence and breadth of offerings.

Other AI spending insights:

• Startups and enterprises are investing heavily in Cursor for AI-powered coding and development, with organizations prioritizing AI-assisted workflows. Cloud-based vector database service Pinecone, a favorite among developers, is also a popular tool in companies of all sizes.
• One fast-growing AI app development tool in both segments is Replit (“the safest place for vibe coding”), which did not appear in April’s top 10 for either segment.
• In both segments, ElevenLabs and Runway are popular AI-generated media and voice synthesis tools accelerating audio and visual work, with image generation platform Midjourney a top-7 tool in the enterprise.

Top SaaS vendors

The top-10 SaaS tools remained the same for both segments in April and May 2025. Google continues to dominate startup spending, reflecting the importance of Google Workspace, Cloud Platform, and advertising services for growing companies. Project management and collaboration platform Atlassian leads enterprise spending with tools like Jira and Confluence. Atlassian is also among startups, ranking third over the past two months.

Twilio is a top tool across both segments, holding the No. 2 spot for startups and enterprises in May. Twilio's communication infrastructure as a service helps companies add SMS, voice, video, and messaging to their apps, demonstrating both the platform's universal need and robust scalability.

Other SaaS spending trends:

• Adobe’s roots run deep in both segments for creative software, but startups are gravitating more toward Figma’s collaborative, cloud-based design platform.
• Indeed spending showed a slight uptick MoM among larger organizations, potentially indicating plans to boost hiring this summer.
• GoDaddy continues to be one of the most popular website hosting platforms across segments, with Squarespace also a top tool among startups. We expect to see these in future Brex Benchmarks since businesses rarely migrate core web infrastructure.
• Direct mail platform Stannp.com was a top-10 SaaS tool in the enterprise. This data supports a rising marketing trend of going analog to cut through the digital noise and directly connect with core audiences.

Sumeet Marwaha is the Senior Manager of Data Science at Brex, supporting the Go-To-Market team in understanding how Brex 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.