Singapore Startups Double Down on AI Stacking as Claude Narrows Gap With ChatGPT

Singapore startups are piling onto multiple AI platforms simultaneously, with the number using three or more tools more than doubling over the past year, according to new data from fintech company Aspire. The report, drawn from anonymised spending data across 10,000 businesses between April 2024 and March 2026, found AI tool adoption grew 42% year-on-year, with a clear shift toward running a stack of specialised AI platforms rather than relying on a single provider.

Some 704 startups now pay for three or more AI tools, up from 339 the previous year. The average startup uses 1.87 AI platforms for tasks ranging from coding and content creation to voice and image generation. Software subscriptions rose 18% year-on-year — the only major spending category to grow in both absolute and relative terms — with AI tools accounting for a quarter of that growth. Meanwhile, digital advertising spend fell 14%, suggesting a reallocation of budgets from customer acquisition into AI-powered operations.

Inside the AI platform market, the competitive picture is tightening fast. ChatGPT still leads with 41% of AI spend among Singapore startups, but Anthropic's Claude has surged to 37%, narrowing OpenAI's lead from a 4.2x advantage to just 1.5x. Claude's paying customers spend more on average — S$1,598 per year versus S$1,144 for ChatGPT — suggesting it's winning heavier enterprise use cases. Cursor, the AI coding tool, holds 15% of spend with 632 paying clients, while ElevenLabs and Perplexity are gaining ground but remain smaller. Midjourney was the only major platform to lose clients, dropping 14%, as multimodal models increasingly absorb standalone image generation.

Aspire CEO Andrea Baronchelli said startups act as an early indicator of where broader business adoption is heading: "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." The data also showed Google Cloud leading cloud infrastructure by client count, ahead of AWS, while Notion has become the default productivity tool for newer startups before they migrate to Jira and Confluence at scale.

Why it matters for Singapore: Aspire's dataset of 10,000 businesses provides one of the most granular pictures available of how Singapore's startup ecosystem is actually spending on AI. The "AI stacking" trend — running multiple specialised AI tools rather than betting on one — suggests that local founders are pragmatically assembling best-of-breed AI stacks rather than locking into any single ecosystem. The rapid narrowing of OpenAI's lead over Anthropic among Singapore's most digitally native companies also signals that the local AI tools market is genuinely competitive, which tends to drive better pricing and faster innovation for end users.