Dear Colleagues: today’s letter is part of a series — Top SaaS Vendors. Every month, Ramp processes billions of dollars in business expenses on its corporate card and bill pay platform. And every month, I will rank the new vendors that customers are purchasing from while sharing emerging market trends and my thoughts on the software industry.
Extras from Ramp data:
The appeal of open source models : Watch my interview on Schwab network from the NYSE floor last week (link)
Kiki/Bouba: My thoughts on why casting for the Beatles biopic feels off (twitter)
Two software trends from Ramp data this month:
Routers for optimized access to affordable models
In the latest Ramp AI Index update, I wrote that businesses are increasingly using routers and model serving platforms to access cheaper models outside of those offered by OpenAI and Anthropic. 5 of our top software vendors this month sell this software. This week, Bloomberg reported that Stripe has reached an agreement to acquire OpenRouter.
Increasingly, I’m being asked why, despite the increased uptake of low-cost Chinese models, I have downplayed the potential impact of this growth on the market share of OpenAI and Anthropic. Mainly, it comes down to the fact that this new router spend is concentrated amongst a segment of businesses that are still increasing their AI spend and still increasing their spend on closed American models too.
These businesses are also amongst the fastest growing businesses on our platform, both in terms of revenue growth and business spend. Therefore, their increased spend on open-source models tends to happen on the margin without crowding out or replacing American AI models. This is also why the increasing pace of AI spend by these firms isn’t requiring cuts from other parts of the business. These firms specifically are growing quickly and have room to grow and spend more. In any case, we’ll track it closely.
No clear winner in AI-first GTM or AI support bots for enterprise
PolyAI, Decagon, and 1mind all appeared on our trending list for the first time. This is an incredibly dynamic market in which, month-over-month, new entrants will unseat incumbents, even amongst the startups with great momentum.
Our Top SaaS Vendors series is built using data from Ramp Rate, a data-backed vendor directory we launched earlier this year. Track market share, business adoption, and growth trends across categories using Ramp’s proprietary data built with actual transactions across 70,000-plus businesses on Ramp’s spend platform.
Here’s a breakdown of the top SaaS vendors last month:
Something from my camera roll
House: 3€ SOLD…i wish it were so simple
Frontier models stack. Open models superstack.
I can only see AI driven support agents getting better from here. I recently called the JetBlue support line where I was told I was speaking with a bot. We had a fairly complex issue with our ticket but it was surprising that the bot was able to figure it out. And it was able to do so in between my ah and um and my toddlers screaming in the background (and me telling them to be quiet).