Today · blog, October 23

Tunguz relays Apollo: top AI spenders 80.4% venture-backed

Venture investor Tomasz Tunguz relays Apollo: in Ramp data, 80.4% of the top 1% of AI spenders have taken venture capital, against 13.1% at the median company

Our AI analysis, unconfirmed: Most of the top 1% of AI spenders have taken venture capital, and no figure yet shows whether funding pays their AI bills Check back when when frontier labs' IPO filings disclose customer concentration

Concept illustration of an open book with a multi-story building drawn on each page. On the left page the building stands on a brick-red base labeled "VC", and a long lined paper strip labeled "AI BILL" hangs from near the top of its side down to the ground, where it curls; on the right page a similar building with no red base has a much shorter strip labeled "AI BILL", and above the book a boxed sign lettered "APOLLO" with a dark and red triangular mark is joined by a line to the top of the right page.

Why it matters: About eight in ten of the heaviest AI spenders are venture-backed; current figures can't say whether venture money pays those AI bills.

Tomasz Tunguz cites Apollo's analysis of the Ramp AI Index: 80.4% of the top 1% of companies by AI spend have taken venture capital, against 13.1% at the median AI spender (Tomasz Tunguz, 2026-10-23). Tunguz's footnoted limits: the data measure dollars, not tokens; the sample leans toward tech and excludes free tools and employees' personal accounts, and Ramp estimates that excluded portion at about 40% of AI application spend; and being venture-backed doesn't mean the bills are paid with venture money. Tunguz concludes: "The circularity is real, but the circle is a sixth of the economy." The basis is the share of employment at venture-backed companies, which rose to more than 13%, a 2025 estimate by the researcher Ando.

Not proven yet: 80.4% appears only in Tunguz's relay How we checked →

Judgment update: Our read: the 13% employment share covers 2017 to 2021, before generative-AI spending took off, so it can't say how AI bills are paid. Sizing the circle requires knowing whether that top 1% pays its AI bills from revenue or from new funding rounds, and neither Apollo's nor Tunguz's figures reach that layer. Ramp's 80% ranks its top 1% by spending on OpenAI and Anthropic, a different ranking from the group behind the 80.4%, and Tunguz doesn't say whether the two groups are the same companies. Our inference: if the two groups largely overlap and the bills are mostly paid with fundraising, a cooling venture market would hit the most concentrated part of frontier labs' revenue first. Neither condition has a number yet. The 80.4% also rests on a single relay. The next thing to watch is whether frontier labs' IPO filings disclose customer concentration.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 25, 2026, alongside 8 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Tunguz relays Apollo: top AI spenders 80.4% venture-backed." https://secondsource.io/en/news/2026-10-25-2/. Accessed access date.