Deepseek led Ramp's trending software vendors in June 2026, according to Ramp's latest report. The category highlights breakout growth relative to company size. Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian noted that US companies are paying Deepseek directly and sending data through its platform, indicating a shift away from self-hosted open-source models. Kharazian also warned about the security and competitive risks of using Chinese models directly and expressed doubts about the trend's longevity. Deepseek launched its V4 model at the end of April, which does not match the best Western models in total performance but costs significantly less. The performance gap is much smaller than the price gap, making it an attractive option for cost-conscious firms. Source: thedecoder
Deepseek had a brief hype cycle in January 2025, reaching 0.3 percent adoption among US companies, according to the Ramp AI Index, before dropping to 0.1 percent. The data reflects real transactions from over 50,000 companies. Western AI labs still lead overall, but Deepseek's rise fits a broader trend of Chinese models gaining popularity due to their price-performance ratio. A December 2025 report showed Chinese models like Deepseek and Alibaba's Qwen surpassed US rivals in Hugging Face downloads, accounting for over 44 percent of all downloads of popular new models. Source: thedecoder
Kharazian sees cost awareness as the likely driver behind Deepseek's strong June performance. Inference platforms like Fireworks AI, fal AI, and DeepInfra are also growing as companies use them to run open-source models instead of paying OpenAI or Anthropic. These are early signs of a token economy, where companies may increasingly choose models based on price-to-performance. There has been ongoing debate about AI's return on investment, which many companies struggle to measure. Meanwhile, model prices have risen across all providers, and it is clear that the era of heavily subsidized flat rates is nearing its end. Source: thedecoder
