Day: October 6, 2025

• After analyzing startups’ bank transactions, a16z found that they’re going hard on vibe coding tools.
• Replit, Cursor, and Lovable rank high as startups pay for AI that builds software from prompts.
• The a16z report comes as vibe coding continues to make waves across Silicon Valley.

Startups are betting big on vibe coding, and their bank statements show it.

Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz partnered with Mercury, a fintech that provides banking and payment tools for startups, to analyze transaction data from more than 200,000 customers between June and August.

The report, released Thursday, tracked where startups are spending their AI dollars and identified the top 50 AI-native application companies based on spending data.

a16z said one category seeing a clear enterprise shift is “vibe coding.” Startups are paying for apps that let anyone build software with prompts instead of programming.

Vibe coding tools like Replit, Cursor, Lovable, and Emergent ranked among the top 50 AI-native application companies. Replit placed third overall in total spend by Mercury users, right behind OpenAI and Anthropic.

“Vibe coding is no mere consumer trend — it has landed in workplaces,” wrote the three a16z staff who authored the report.

“We are interested in observing the vibe coding evolution over time. Will the space ‘fragment’ through a rise of platforms for developing different types of applications?” they added.

The report also said that horizontal AI tools — the kind anyone in a company can use, from meeting copilots to general AI assistants — made up about 60% of the companies on the top-50 list, compared with 40% for vertical tools built for specialized functions.

Creative apps like Canva and ElevenLabs, along with vibe coding tools, fall into that horizontal category, a16z said. While creative tools were once reserved for marketing and design teams — and coding tools for engineers — AI has made them accessible to anyone.

“AI has opened up applications in these categories that can be (and are) used by people in any role. We’re seeing this in a few categories, where typically domain-specific tools are becoming more horizontal,” the report said.

a16z did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Vibe coding is here to stay

Vibe coding has become one of Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzwords.

The term was coined in February by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, who described it as “a new kind of coding” where you “fully give in to the vibes” and “forget that the code even exists.”

It has turned into a marketable skill. Companies from Visa to Reddit to DoorDash have posted jobs that require vibe coding experience or familiarity with AI coding tools. Meta said in July that it would allow job candidates to use an AI assistant in their coding interviews.

The money is following the momentum. In July, Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, announced a $900 million Series C fundraise at a $9.9 billion valuation. Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable also raised $200 million in Series A funding in July at a $1.8 billion valuation, according to PitchBook.

Still, the technology has its limits. Though vibe coding promises quick productivity gains and allows people with little coding experience to create software, tech executives say AI is still prone to mistakes, often writes unnecessarily long code, or lacks the proper architecture.

“It’s still not in a place yet where we would trust it with our core technology,” Rowan Trollope, the CEO of Redis, a software company, told Business Insider in an August report.

• Duolingo’s former product head said high agency trumps experience in the world of AI.
• In fact, experience can even hinder adaptability, he said.
• Tech leaders, like LinkedIn’s CEO, echo the value of adaptability over traditional experience.

Experience can only take you so far in the world of AI, said Duolingo’s ex-head of product.

In an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” released on Sunday, Albert Cheng, the former head of product at Duolingo and Grammarly, said that top performers were not always the ones with vast experience.

“I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy,” Cheng said. “They cared about the mission, but they didn’t necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter.”

In fact, experience could even become a “crutch,” he said.

“Especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your learned habits actually need to be intentionally discarded.”

He added, “You need to have a beginner’s mind on this type of stuff. So, I think this is more true than ever.”

Cheng worked at Duolingo for three years, until 2023, and at Grammarly for nearly two years after. He is now the chief growth officer at Chess.com.

On the podcast, he shared how he hires employees with high agency.

“A lot of it actually happens outside of the interview process, interestingly,” he said. “A lot of it is the types of questions they asked. Have they actually tried your product and gone deep into it?”

Other factors include the candidate’s references, how they communicated setting up the interview, and the energy they bring to the conversation, Cheng said.

“I’ve learned to balance those things quite a bit more than I did in the past when I would just purely read from my questions in my rubric and not care about anything else,” he added.

Cheng did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Cheng joins tech leaders who said that experience is not the most desirable trait in employees and leaders.

Liang Wenfeng, the founder of the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, has said he favors creativity over experience.

“If you are pursuing short-term goals, it is right to find people with ready experience,” he said in a 2023 interview with 36KR, a Chinese tech publication. “But if you look at the long-term, experience is not that important. Basic skills, creativity, and passion are much more important. From this perspective, there are many suitable candidates in China.”

Last week, Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, said that initiative and adaptability will be more valuable in the future as companies incorporate AI in the workplace.

“My guess is that the future of work belongs not anymore to the people that have the fanciest degrees or went to the best colleges, but to the people who are adaptable, forward thinking, ready to learn, and ready to embrace these tools,” Roslansky said at a fireside chat at the company’s office.

Negotiators are in Egypt for Israel-Hamas ceasefire talks based on the 20-point proposal backed by President Donald Trump. Follow for live updates.

• Prince William said his parents’ marriage shaped how he shows up as a husband and father.
• “But you take that and you learn from it and you try and make sure you don’t do the same mistakes as your parents,” he said.
• The Prince of Wales said eating together — without phones — helps his family bond.

Prince William says his parents’ failed relationship taught him what kind of partner and parent he wants to be.

During an appearance on Canadian actor Eugene Levy’s Apple TV+ series “The Reluctant Traveler,” the Prince of Wales said he wanted to give his children as normal a home life as possible. The episode aired on Friday.

“I think it’s really important that that atmosphere is created at home. You have to have that warmth, that feeling of safety, security, love,” William told Levy. “That all has to be there, and that was certainly part of my childhood.”

However, since his parents got divorced when he was 14, that sense of stability “lasted a short period of time,” William said.

“But you take that and you learn from it and you try and make sure you don’t do the same mistakes as your parents,” he said. “I think we all try and do that. I just want to do what’s best for my children, but I know that the drama and the stress when you’re small really affects you when you’re older.”

William also shared that one of the ways his family bonds is by sitting down at the dinner table together.

“So, we sit and chat, it’s really important. None of our children have any phones, which we’re very strict about,” William said.

Williams’s parents, Princess Diana and then-Prince Charles, wed on July 29, 1981. Their marriage was troubled from the beginning, overshadowed by Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana and Charles separated in 1992 and finalized their divorce in 1996. The following year, Diana died in a car crash.

Reflecting on the “insatiable” media scrutiny that followed his parents’ marriage, and his mother in particular, William said that it made him more protective of his own family.

“They wanted every bit of detail they could absorb, and they were in everything, literally everywhere. They would know things, they’d be everywhere. If you let that creep in, the damage it can do to your family life is something that I vowed would never happen to my family,” William said.

A representative for William did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.

William isn’t the only public figure to reflect on how their parents’ relationship shaped their own approach to family and marriage.

During a March appearance on the “Sibling Revelry” podcast, Macaulay Culkin said his strained relationship with his father taught him what not to do as a parent.

“It’s one of my earliest memories of him was, ‘When I grew up, this is how I’m not gonna be with my kids,'” Culkin told podcast hosts Kate and Oliver Hudson.

In July, Tracee Ellis Ross said her mother, Diana Ross, inspired her to find joy and meaning in being alone.

“[My mom] didn’t build the wealth she has, she didn’t build the career she made because of a man. The example that was set for me [was] that I didn’t need a man to build the life I wanted. It wasn’t, ‘Look at me,’ it was, ‘This is me.’ And that informed something very important for me foundationally,” Ross told Self Magazine.