@FinanceYF5: The Real Money in AI Hype: A Shift from Applications to 'Pipelines' 1/ Brex reports on the top 25 fastest-growing software companies for summer 2026. Among them, 14 are in AI infrastructure, and 6 are AI products built on these foundations. Leading the pack is Together AI, offering open model services. In the AI boom, growth is most...

The AI Boom’s Real Money-Makers Are Shifting from Applications to “Pipes”

1/ Brex tallied the 25 fastest-growing software companies in the summer of 2026.

Of them, 14 sell AI infrastructure, while another 6 are AI products built on top of that infrastructure. Topping the list is Together AI, which offers open model services.

In the AI boom, the fastest-growing segments are turning into compute power, databases, caching, and sandboxes. 👇 https://t.co/jgp7yyAoBE

2/ Open models can be downloaded for free, but a whole stack of technology stands between them and being truly usable.

GPU clouds rent the machines; Modal, RunPod handle containers and auto-scaling; Together AI, Deepinfra, and others package models into APIs; Tinker adds managed fine-tuning on top.

Each layer is selling “a little less to worry about.”

3/ Startups are shifting to open models at a dramatically accelerating pace.

The median time from first paying for an OpenAI or Anthropic API to first purchasing open model compute has shrunk from 23 months in 2022 to just 5 months in 2025.

The core reason is straightforward: some workloads can see an 80% cost reduction.

4/ But open models are not replacing closed models; instead, startups are starting to run both tracks.

Complex reasoning and customer-facing conversations continue using closed-source APIs; large-scale tasks like classification, extraction, transcription, and generation are shifting to open models that are 5–20 times cheaper.

98% of buyers of open compute are still paying OpenAI or Anthropic.

5/ The second fastest-growing infrastructure segment is databases.

Neon states that over 80% of new databases are created by AI Agents; Supabase’s data shows a similar figure at over 60%.

Agents can spin up thousands of applications per day, requiring databases that provision in seconds, have near-zero idle costs, and can be instantly duplicated. Traditional architectures struggle to adapt to this pace.

6/ The “first database” for startups has also changed.

Supabase’s share of initial standalone database purchases has risen from about 15% in 2023 to 38% in 2026; Pinecone’s has fallen from 22% to under 2%.

Vector search hasn’t disappeared—it’s being gradually integrated into Postgres.

7/ Among startups that joined Brex in 2025, nearly one in ten purchased Supabase within their first year.

The median time from generating an app with Lovable, Replit, or Bolt to starting to pay for Supabase or Neon is just 106 days.

The earliest real signal of an agent economy emerging might be two bills: for compute and databases.

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