⛵ Dhow Dispatch │ AI Spend: Muslim Founders Are Overrepresented

Andreessen Horowitz, in partnership with Mercury, published a transactions-based ranking of the top 50 AI application companies that startups are actually paying for.

The dataset covers 200,000+ Mercury business customers from June through August 2025, making this a rare view into real budgets rather than traffic or social buzz. Mercury also has a Muslim-origin founder, and we will feature the Company soon.

Within that ranking, three of the top ten and roughly 14% of the top fifty companies have Muslim-origin founders; expanding the lens to include Iranian-origin founders raises the share to about 18% by our count.

The core takeaway is not symbolic; rather, it is practical: the founder pipeline from our community is already converting to paid adoption.

The report identifies AI-application vendors by share of wallet in startup spending and excludes infrastructure such as cloud platforms or GPU providers. This makes the list a cleaner read on the tools that teams integrate into daily workflows to drive near-term outcomes.

The top of the board features OpenAI (#1) and Anthropic (#2). The notable surprise is Replit at #3, ahead of many general-productivity suites, with Cursor at #6 anchoring the “vibe-coding” cohort. Check out our feature of Replit here.

Below are the Muslim-origin founders and companies present on the list, with plain-English descriptions of what each product enables in a startup stack.

Also notable (Iranian-origin founders, unable to confirm religious background):

Our findings come from research we personally conducted and carefully reviewed.

Startups are prioritizing developer copilots, GTM assistants, and vertical AI that demonstrate measurable impact within a quarter. Tools that reduce time-to-value, plug deeply into the stack (repos, ticketing, CRM), and then become costly to replace are earning increasing shares of budget. The a16z analysis also notes that categories like creative tools and “vibe coding” have broadened from niche departments to horizontal usage across roles.

Importantly, the market has not consolidated to one or two winners per function. Teams are assembling multi-tool stacks that compound ROI; e.g., pairing a dev copilot with a GTM copilot, so growth in one category often lifts adjacent categories.

For our community, this is more than a moment of representation; it is evidence that Muslim-origin founders are winning in categories where budgets are expanding. Replit’s rise to #3 on spend, alongside Cursor’s presence at #6, aligns with independent reporting on step-function growth in revenue and adoption for these developer platforms. That momentum reinforces the case for earlier, more organized capital into Muslim-led companies building in high-velocity segments of AI.

If you would like us to prioritize a specific company, reply “Deep Dive + {company}.”

This ranking reflects Mercury-visible spend and therefore may not capture all enterprise contracts or transactions routed through other providers. It still offers a strong directional view of where startup budgets are going. Our founder-origin mapping is compiled from public information and ongoing outreach and will be refined as new data comes in.

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