Brex ranked the 25 fastest-growing vendors - 14 of them are not AI products

Most of the money startups spend on AI is not reaching AI. It stops one layer down, at the compute, open models and databases that everything else gets written onto.

- Together AI tops the list, renting access to open models
- The first open-compute vendor shows up 5 months after the first frontier-lab bill, twice as fast as 2024
- Neon says agents create over 80% of its new databases, Supabase says over 60%
- Supabase went from about 15% of first-ever database purchases in 2023 to 38% in 2026

The number worth sitting with is 106 days: the median gap between a founder's first app-builder charge and their first paid database. If the agent picks the infrastructure, being the default inside Lovable beats having a sales team.

https://www.brex.com/journal/brex-benchmark-articles/top-25-fastest-growing-startups-of-summer-2026

📎 Read also:
→ Supabase asked 2,000 founders what is hard now
→ Exponential View priced real AI demand at $175B
→ OpenSEO - open-source suite billed by usage, not subscription