Singapore start-ups are paying for more artificial intelligence (AI) tools, with the number using three or more AI platforms more than doubling in a year.
The findings are based on anonymised transaction data from more than 10,000 businesses on Aspire’s platform. The data covers card spending, payroll, bank transfers and software subscriptions across two fiscal years, from April 2024 to March 2026.
AI tool adoption among Singapore start-ups grew 42% year-on-year (y-o-y). Start-ups used an average of 1.87 AI platforms in the fiscal year ended March 2026, while the number paying for three or more AI platforms rose to 704 from 339.
The report describes the trend as “AI stacking,” with start-ups using different platforms for tasks such as coding, content, voice and image generation.
The growth in AI tools came as software subscriptions increased 18% y-o-y, making it the only major spending category in the report to grow in both absolute and relative terms. AI tools accounted for about 25% of total subscription growth.
The rest of the software subscription growth came from broader recurring spending, including hosting, domains and infrastructure billed as subscriptions, where Aspire did not have tool-level visibility.
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Digital advertising spend among Singapore start-ups fell 14% y-o-y, the steepest decline among major categories in the dataset.
The gap between ChatGPT and Claude adoption narrows
Aspire’s report also reveals that OpenAI’s ChatGPT remained the largest AI platform by spending share among Singapore start-ups in the fiscal year ended March 2026, with 41% of AI platform spend.
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Anthropic’s Claude followed with 37%, narrowing the gap with ChatGPT as OpenAI’s client lead over Claude fell to 1.5 times from 4.2 times a year earlier. Cursor accounted for 15% of AI platform spend.
Claude had fewer paying clients than ChatGPT, but higher average spending per account, at US$1,598 annually compared with US$1,144 for ChatGPT users, according to Aspire.
Cursor, an AI coding tool, ranked third in Singapore by the number of unique clients, with 632 paying clients. ElevenLabs had 348 clients, while Perplexity AI had 273.
Midjourney was the only major AI platform in the report to lose clients, falling 14% over the period. Aspire says standalone image AI tools are being displaced by platforms that now include image generation.
Software stack
Aspire’s wider software data showed cloud and infrastructure accounted for 44.8% of software-as-a-service (SaaS) spending among Singapore startups in fiscal 2026. Productivity and project management tools made up 26%.
Google Cloud ranked first in cloud and development infrastructure by client count in Singapore, ahead of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Google Workspace led productivity and project management, followed by Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence, Notion, ClickUp and Microsoft 365.
The report says newer start-ups defaulted to Notion for flexibility, while scaling companies used Jira and Confluence for structure. Xero accounted for 88.7% of the finance and accounting category spend.
"Start-ups often act as an early indicator of where broader business adoption is heading. They move faster, experiment more freely and respond to economic pressure sooner than larger organisations. What we're seeing is the emergence of a new generation of businesses that are increasingly AI-native, globally distributed and able to scale with far greater flexibility than before,” says Andrea Baronchelli, co-founder and CEO at Aspire.
