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After analyzing the bank transactions of Startups, A16Z discovered that they are working hard with vibe coding tools.
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Replit, Cursor and Lovable score high because startups pay for AI that builds software based on prompts.
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The A16Z report comes while vibe coding in Silicon Valley continues to make a furore.
Startups focus a lot on vibe coding, and that is evident from their bank statements.
Durfing company Andreessen Horowitz collaborated with Mercury, a fintech that offers banking and payment aids for startups, to analyze transaction data of more than 200,000 customers between June and August.
The report, which was released on Thursday, kept to where startups published their AI dollars and identified the top 50 of AI-Native application companies based on spending data.
A16Z said that a category that sees a clear shift in business is ‘vibe coding’. Pay startups for apps with which everyone can build software with instructions instead of programming.
Vibe coding tools such as replit, cursor, Lovable and Emergent are among the top 50 of AI-Native application companies. Replit finished in third place in the total editions of Mercury users, just behind OpenAi and Anthropic.
“Vibe coding is not merely a consumer trend; it ended up in the workplace,” wrote the three A16Z employees who wrote the report.
“We are interested in observing the evolution of vibe coding over time. Will the space ‘fragment’ through a rise of platforms for the development of different types of applications?” they added.
The report also states that horizontal AI tools-the species that anyone can use in a company, from meeting coopilots to general AI assistants-make up around 60% of companies in the top 50, compared to 40% for vertical tools built for specialized functions.
Creative apps such as Canva and Elevenlabs, together with vibe coding tools, fall into that horizontal category, according to A16Z. While creative tools were once reserved for marketing and design teams- and coding tools for engineers- AI made them accessible to everyone.
“AI has opened applications in these categories that can (and are) used by people in any role whatsoever. We see this in a few categories, where domain -specific tools usually become horizontal,” the report said.
A16Z did not respond to a request for comments from Business Insider.
Vibe coding has become one of Silicon Valley’s favorite fashion words.
The term was devised in February by Andrej Karpathy, co -founder of OpenAi, who described it as ‘a new kind of coding’ where you ‘fully give to the atmosphere’ and ‘forget that the code even exists’.
