DeepSeek topped Ramp’s June “Trending Software Vendors” ranking, surpassing event management platform PheedLoop and open-source model hosting platform Fireworks AI. Ramp’s list tracks the first time a company purchases services from a particular software vendor. DeepSeek reaching the top spot means more and more U.S. companies are actively signing up to use models from this Chinese startup. Ramp Chief Economist Ara Kharazian specifically noted that these companies are paying DeepSeek directly, rather than self-hosting its open-source models — meaning corporate data is flowing bidirectionally between them and servers in China. In his report, he wrote: “This may be the biggest signal yet that companies are looking for cheaper alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic — some are even willing to use cheaper Chinese models, allowing U.S. data to flow across borders to hosted servers in China.”
DeepSeek previously saw a brief spike in January 2025, when U.S. enterprise adoption briefly hit 0.3% before falling back to 0.1%, a level it maintained through April of this year. For comparison, Anthropic and OpenAI held 34.4% and 32.3% shares, respectively, in Ramp’s AI index. Ramp did not disclose specific market share data for June. This rebound for DeepSeek is seen as part of a broader trend — companies are accelerating their migration toward open-source models to cope with high AI costs. It also corroborates Ramp’s previous disclosure that “AI costs have become one of the top issues for enterprises.”