Topics
previous
AI
Amazon
Image Credits:Hispanolistic / Getty Images
Apps
Biotech & Health
Climate
Image Credits:Hispanolistic / Getty Images
Cloud Computing
Commerce
Crypto
Top 10 COSS startups in the ROSS Index for 2023.Image Credits: Runa Capital
Enterprise
EVs
Fintech
Top 50 COSS startups in the ROSS Index for 2023.Image Credits: Runa Capital
fundraise
Gadgets
Gaming
ROSS Index: Trending programming languages.Image Credits: Runa Capital
Government & Policy
computer hardware
ROSS Index: Contributors, stars, and funding.Image Credits: Runa Capital
layoff
Media & Entertainment
Meta
Microsoft
Privacy
Robotics
Security
societal
quad
Startups
TikTok
Department of Transportation
Venture
More from TechCrunch
Events
Startup Battlefield
StrictlyVC
Podcasts
Videos
Partner Content
TechCrunch Brand Studio
Crunchboard
Contact Us
New report highlights ‘top trending’ commercial open source companies
A newfangled account highlight the demand for startups building open source shaft and technologies for the snowballing AI revolution , with the contiguous data infrastructure vertical also inflame up .
Runa Capital , a venture chapiter ( VC ) firm that left Silicon Valley andmoved its headquarters to Luxembourgin 2022 , has publish the Runa Open Source Startup ( ROSS ) Index forthe past four yr , shining a igniter on thefastest - growing commercial-grade open seed software(COSS ) startups . The company publishes quarterly update , but last yr itproduced its first annual report , drive a top - down view of the whole of 2022 — something it ’s repeating now for 2023 .
Trends
Data is close aligned with AI because AI relies on data for learning and name predictions , and this requires infrastructure to negociate the collection , entrepot , and processing of that data . And these digressive trends clash in this theme .
hit top - stain in the ROSS Index for last year wasLangChain , a two - year - old San Francisco – based inauguration that has developedan candid source frameworkfor building apps based on large oral communication models ( LLMs ) . The company ’s main project passed 72,500 star in 2023 , with Sequoia go on tolead a $ 25 million Series A beat into LangChainjust last month .
Elsewhere in the top 10 isReflex , anopen source frameworkfor creating web apps in thoroughgoing Python , with the ship’s company behind the product recentlysecuring a $ 5 millionseed investment;AITable , a spreadsheet - establish AI chatbot builder and something consanguine toan opened source Airtablecompetitor;Sismo , a privacy - focused political program that allows drug user toselectively disclose personal datato applications;HPC - AI , which is work up a distributed AI growth and deployment platform in a get-up-and-go to become something like the OpenAI of Southeast Asia ; and undefended generator vector database Qdrant , whichrecently secured $ 28 millionto capitalize on the burgeoning AI gyration .
A broader looking at at the “ top 50 trending ” open reference startups last year reveals that more than half ( 26 ) are related to AI and information infrastructure .
It ’s difficult to properly equate the 2023 index with the previous class from a vertical perspective , due largely to the fact that businesses often pivot or change their product positioning to suit what ’s hot today . With theChatGPT hype traingoing full throttle last year , this may have led former - stage startup to alter their focusing , or even just place greater emphasis on the existing “ AI ” element of their ware .
Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI
Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI
But asgenerative AI ’s breakthrough year , it ’s well-fixed to see why demand for open author componentry might skyrocket , as caller of all sizes search to keep apace with proprietary AI juggernauts such as OpenAI , Microsoft , and Google .
Geographies
Open beginning computer software has also always been very distributed , with developers from all over the globe contributing . This ethos often translates into commercial open source startup that might not have a traditional mall of gravity anchored by a brick - and - mortar HQ .
However , the ROSS Index go some manner toward bringing geographics into the picture , reporting that 26 company on the list have an HQ in the U.S. , though 10 of these companionship originated elsewhere and still have founder or employee base in other locales .
In total , the top 50 hailed from 17 disjoined nation , with 23 of the companies incorporate in Europe — a 20 % rise on the former twelvemonth ’s index . France counted the most COSS startups with seven , includingSismoandMassa , which are in the top 10 , while the U.K. soared from just one inauguration in 2022 to six in 2023 , placing it in second place from a European perspective .
Other notable tidbits to emerge from the story include programming languages — the ROSS Index recorded 12 linguistic communication used by the top 50 last year , versus 10 in 2022 . ButTypeScript , a JavaScript superset developed by Microsoft , remained the most popular , used by 38 % of the top 50 startups . Both Python and Rust grew in popularity , with Go and JavaScript dropping .
The top 50 ROSS Index participants jointly make headway 12,000 contributors in 2023 , while the overall GitHub star - count increase by nearly 500,000 . The forefinger also expose that funding into the top 50 COSS startups last year hit $ 513 million , an increment of 32 % on 2022 and 145 % on 2021 .
Methodology and context
It ’s deserving looking at themethodology behind all this — what divisor act upon whether a company is considered “ top trending ” ? For starters , all company included must have at least 1,000 GitHub stars ( a GitHub metric similar to a “ like ” in societal media ) to be considered . But asterisk - enumeration alone does n’t order us much about what ’s trending , given that stars are accumulated over metre — so a project that has been on GitHub for 10 years is likely to have accumulated more stars than one that has subsist for 10 months . alternatively , Runa measures the relative growth of the stars over a given period using an annualized growth rate ( AGR ) — this looks at the star value now versus a previous corresponding period to see what has grown most imposingly .
A degree of manual curation is involved here , too , given that the goal is to eke out open source “ startups ” specifically — so the Runa investment team pulls out projects that belong to a “ mathematical product - centre commercial organization , ” and it has to have been founded few than 10 years ago with less than $ 100 million in know funding .
define what constitutes “ open source ” has its own inherent challenge , too , as there is a spectrum of how “ capable source ” a inauguration is — some are more akin to “ open meat , ” where most of their major feature article are shut away behind a exchange premium paywall , and some have permit that are more restrictive than others . So for this , the conservator at Runa adjudicate that the startup must simply have a product that is “ somewhat associate to its open - source [ repositories ] , ” which obviously involves a point of subjectivity when deciding which 1 make the cut .
There are further nuance at play too . The ROSS Index adopts a specially liberal interpretation of “ overt root ” — for example , both Elasticand MongoDBabandoned their exposed source rootsfor licence that are “ beginning available , ” to protect themselves from being take reward of by the major cloud providers . harmonise to the ROSS Index ’s methodology , both these companies would restrict as “ open source ” — even though their permission are not formally approved as such by theOpen Source Initiative , and these specific exemplar companies no longer cite to themselves as “ open reservoir . ”
Thus , according to Runa ’s methodology , it expend what it name the “ commercial perception of loose - source ” for its report , rather than the actual license the party attach to its project . This means that restricted source - available licenses likeBSL(business reference license ) andSSPL(server side public license ) , which MongoDB introduced as part of its passage away from open source in 2018 , are very much on the fare as far as commercial ship’s company in the ROSS Index are concerned .
“ Such licenses maintain the OSS spirit — all its freedoms , except for slightly limited redistribution , which does not dissemble developers but grants original trafficker a long - terminus private-enterprise sharpness , ” Konstantin Vinogradov , Runa Capital ’s London - based universal partner , explained to TechCrunch . “ From a VC perspective , it is just an evolved playbook for exactly the same eccentric of companies . The opened root definition applies to software products , not companies . ”
There are other notable filter in shoes too . For instance , companies that are mostly focalise on provide professional services , or side projection with limited dynamic musical accompaniment or with no commercial element , are not include in the ROSS Index .
For comparative intention , there are other index finger and list out there that give a confidential information on the “ what s red-hot ” in the open author landscape . Another VC firm called Two Sigma Ventures maintains theOpen Source Index , for representative , which is alike in concept to Runa ’s , except it spans all manner of open source projects ( not just startups ) and has additional filter in topographic point , let in the ability to view by GitHub ’s “ watchers ” system of measurement , which some argue gives a more accurate picture of a labor ’s true popularity .
GitHub itself also put out atrending repositoriespage , which , like to Two Sigma Ventures , does n’t concentrate on the business organisation behind the projection .
So the ROSS Index has emerge as a utilitarian complementary tool for figuring out which open source “ startups ” specifically are worth keeping tabs on .
