Rebel Alliance vs Fat Models

Shai Goldman
June 30, 2026

Happy Tuesday Brex Community,

The folks at Union Square Ventures wrote an interesting post, essentially there remains a large opportunity to compete against the “Fat Models” aka OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and I would also add SpaceX / xAI (with its acquisition of Cursor), which they call the Rebel Alliance.

Both the “Fat Models” and “Rebel Alliance” can win, there is a massive opportunity ahead of us, we are still so early, so it’s not either / or.

Given that many companies have already gone way over budget on their token / inference spend in 2026 and we are only half way through the year, the boards, c-level and finance leaders are going to be discussing what they do different heading in 2027 budget cycle and part of that is going to include finding alternative solutions, building more custom solutions, saving costs & having more spend predictability, this creates a lot of tail winds for the Rebel Alliance, so excited to see how this plays out.

Have a great week!

Shai Goldman

I’m very bullish on the “gundo” scene & the reinvigoration to build physical things in 🇺🇸, so excited to see the official news that Discipulus Ventures raised their $30M VC fund. The firm is lead by 22 year old Jakob Diepenbrock, who has a brought a lot energy to the builder community.

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Brex is the intelligent finance platform built for speed and control. Combining corporate cards, banking, treasury, expense management, bill pay, travel, and accounting, Brex helps companies spend smarter and move faster in 120 countries. By integrating AI across every workflow, Brex enables founders and finance teams to eliminate manual work, do more with less, and accelerate impact. More than 35,000 companies from startups to enterprises run on Brex, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Granola, ServiceTitan, Robinhood, DoorDash, etc.

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