I Reverse-Engineered 200 AI Startups. 146 Are Selling You Repackaged ChatGPT and Claude with New UI. Teja Kusireddy 11 min read · Nov 3, 2025 -- 88 Share
I monitored network traffic, decompiled code, and traced API calls for 200 funded AI startups. 73% are running third-party APIs with extra steps. OpenAI dominates, Claude is everywhere, and the gap between marketing and reality is staggering.
This story is part 2 of the AI Reality Trilogy, a three-part series on what AI is really doing to infrastructure, startups, and you.
Part 1 → We Spent $47,000 Running AI Agents in Production. Here’s What Nobody Tells You About A2A and MCP.
Part 3 → Coming soon: Stop Crying About AI Taking Your Job. You Were Already Replaceable.
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Last month, I went down a rabbit hole that started with a simple question and ended with me questioning everything I thought I knew about the AI startup ecosystem.
It was 2 AM. I was debugging a webhook integration when I noticed something odd. A company claiming to have proprietary deep learning infrastructure was making calls to OpenAI’s API every few seconds. The same company that just raised $4.3M by promising investors they’d built something fundamentally different.
That’s when I decided to find out how deep this goes.
The Methodology: How I Actually Did This