How Much AI Coding Market Cap Stays With Startups?

Aaron Levie is comfortable underwriting a couple hundred billion dollars of market cap in the AI coding space that do not go to incumbents. Coding agents are the first knowledge-work tools to hit critical mass, and the same opening exists in every other field.

Nearly infinite startup opportunity follows a complete shift in software. Industries and parts of business that previously had no software will have software for the first time as AI agents, and most domains of knowledge work will have an agent for that work. Incumbents will take some categories, while startups can still build knowledge-work agents in every category. Replit, Cursor, Windsurf, Lovable, and Cognition are the clear early examples. Ten years ago, $20, $30, or $40 billion of market cap in coding would not have sounded plausible, because GitHub was the only real exit in the space. $30, $40, or $50 billion inside a three-year period is already happening and only scratching the surface, given how much surface area still has to exist.

Life sciences, healthcare, legal work, and consulting get the same pattern. New AI agent companies in each field will outrun traditional software incumbents and traditional services companies, which opens a new environment for startups.