a16z analyzed startup bank transactions and found they're going hard on vibe coding tools (www.businessinsider.com)

Andreessen Horowitz, partnering with startup bank Mercury, analyzed transactions from over 200,000 customers (June–August) to map where startups are spending on AI. Their report ranks the top 50 “AI-native” application companies by customer spend and finds a clear enterprise shift toward “vibe coding” — prompt-driven tools that let non‑engineers build software. Replit, Cursor, Lovable and Emergent all placed among the top spend recipients, with Replit third overall behind OpenAI and Anthropic. The analysis also shows horizontal AI tooling (copilots, creative apps, general assistants) makes up roughly 60% of the top-50, signaling broad, cross‑role adoption rather than niche, domain‑specific uptake. For practitioners and product leaders, the takeaway is twofold: vibe coding is moving from consumer hype into everyday workflows, accelerating democratization of software creation and driving substantial vendor spend and VC funding; but it still has technical limits. Vibe tools boost speed and lower the barrier to prototyping, yet remain prone to errors, verbose or poorly architected outputs, and aren’t yet trusted for core systems. a16z flags a key open question — whether the space will fragment into specialized platforms for different application types — making investment, integration and governance choices critical for teams adopting these tools.