According to the latest Brex Benchmark report, the majority of this summer’s fastest-growing software startups are not selling end‑user AI applications. Instead, they provide the underlying infrastructure—such as GPU compute, databases, and sandbox environments—that powers AI agents and other intelligent services.
AI compute and database vendors dominate the list
Fourteen of the 25 companies highlighted sell AI compute resources or database platforms, and six more offer AI products that run on those stacks. The top‑ranked firm, Together AI, rents access to open‑source models, while other vendors like DeepInfra, Baseten and Fireworks provide managed endpoints for popular open models.
Open‑weight models are freely downloadable but require substantial hardware and software to become usable. Startups now purchase GPU clouds, serverless platforms and managed fine‑tuning services to handle these needs. For example, a Nvidia H100 GPU now rents for about $3.40 per hour, down from roughly $8 in 2023, allowing startups to process tokens for pennies per million.
Cost savings drive rapid adoption
Brex data indicates that startups are adding open‑compute vendors within five months of their first large‑scale AI API bill—twice as fast as in 2024. Moving from proprietary AI APIs to open‑source models can cut cloud costs by up to 80% overnight.
Database usage reflects a similar shift. Supabase adoption grew 17‑fold between the 2022 and 2025 cohorts, and AI agents now create more than 80% of new databases for companies like Neon. Modern cloud databases separate compute from storage, enabling near‑zero idle costs and allowing AI agents to provision thousands of databases daily without prohibitive expense.
What the spending data reveals
Entry‑level bills for these services are modest—often just a few dozen dollars per month—yet the volume is massive. Millions of tiny databases and compute instances are being created, turning the market into a utility‑like model where revenue is driven by count rather than contract size.
The report concludes that purchases of AI compute and databases are the earliest reliable signals of which AI‑agent companies will become sustainable businesses.
All analysis uses anonymized, aggregated Brex customer data. The story was produced by Brex and distributed by Stacker.
Original reporting: El Paso News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
