AI is changing what skills people have, what tasks people do, and what teams look like. That change is hitting big companies differently from small companies. While big companies are getting incremental benefits to existing team structures, at startups we’re seeing truly AI-native companies emerge, built around the next generation of software.
But what does this next generation of software look like? We worked with Mercury, the fintech ambitious companies use for banking, credit cards, and all their financial workflows, to collect and analyze spend across their database of over 200,000 customers, looking at patterns over the last three months (June – August 2025).
We then identified the top 50 AI-native application layer companies – similar to our Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps, but built around spend data versus web traffic data.
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