Anthropic’s Claude has rapidly gained ground on OpenAI’s ChatGPT among Singapore startups, with its customer base growing 258 percent year-on-year and total spend increasing 17 times, according to new data from Singapore-based financial platform Aspire.

Aspire revealed the findings in its “Startup Signals: Decoding the Forces Shaping Asia’s Next Generation of Businesses” report, featuring transaction data from more than 10,000 businesses across Singapore and Hong Kong.

A year ago, OpenAI had more than four times as many paying startup clients as Anthropic in Singapore. That ratio has now narrowed to 1.5 times. Claude now accounts for 37 percent of all AI platform spend despite having fewer users than ChatGPT, reflecting growing adoption among startups drawn to its developer tooling, workflow integrations, and agent-based use cases. Over the same period, ChatGPT’s customer base grew 79 percent.

The number of Singapore startups using AI tools grew 42 percent year-on-year. Companies running three or more AI platforms simultaneously more than doubled, suggesting AI has moved beyond experimentation into core operational infrastructure serving specialized functions across coding, content creation, research, customer support, and workflow automation.

The report also found that payroll activity increased sharply across Southeast Asia, with Malaysia growing 52 percent and the Philippines 19 percent as payroll destinations, while India recorded its first decline at 9 percent. One in five Singapore startups now pays workers on an ad-hoc basis. Singapore startup travel spend grew 11 percent year-on-year, with flights increasing 35 percent and accounting for nearly half of all travel expenditure.

On workspace, office-related spending accounts for 44 percent of infrastructure costs, exceeding cloud and remote work tooling combined. Fixed lease costs contracted while co-working spend nearly doubled, with IWG growing 90 percent and WeWork 80 percent.

Andrea Baronchelli, co-founder and CEO of Aspire, said startups act as an early indicator of where broader business adoption is heading, and that what is emerging is a new generation of businesses that are increasingly AI-native, globally distributed, and able to scale with far greater flexibility than before.

AI platform race is tightening across Asia’s startup ecosystem, Aspire data shows