A brand new report showcases the 20 top-trending open supply startups world wide, greater than half of that are carefully aligned with AI.
The report is the handiwork of European enterprise capital agency Runa Capital, which has operated the Runa Open Source Startup (ROSS) Index since 2020. The Index serves quarterly updates on the fastest-growing initiatives by way of GitHub “stars” — a metric that’s one thing akin to a “like” on social media. Beginning in 2023, Runa began producing annual reviews, highlighting the preferred industrial open supply startups in a given 12 months.
Last 12 months’s report demonstrated that AI and information infrastructure had been driving demand for open supply tooling, with LangChain hitting pole place within the ROSS Index for its open supply framework for constructing LLM-centric apps.
This 12 months it’s the same story, with AI central to 11 of the highest 20 firms.
It’s price noting that the ROSS Index is closely curated and doesn’t embrace any previous open supply undertaking. Qualifying initiatives should be carefully linked to a industrial firm (i.e., a vendor-led undertaking), that means no aspect initiatives. Additionally, these firms should be youthful than 10 years previous; raised lower than $100 million in funding; and be solely unbiased — so not a subsidiary or publicly listed.
Stargazing
In high spot on the 2024 ROSS Index is Ollama, a Y Combinator alum that’s constructed an open supply device for working LLMs akin to Meta’s Llama and DeepSeek regionally (i.e., desktop). Ollama’s GitHub star depend elevated by some 76,000 by 2024, rising 261% to greater than 105,000 (it has since risen to greater than 135,000 stars over the previous few months).
Next on the listing is Zed Industries, a cross-platform collaborative code editor “designed for high-performance collaboration with people and AI.” The Zed undertaking has been round for some time, but it surely solely went open supply in January 2024, and thru the remainder of the 12 months it gained greater than 52,000 GitHub stars.
In third place is LangGenius, the corporate behind an open supply LLM app improvement platform referred to as Dify. The undertaking attained greater than 43,000 new GitHub stars final 12 months, rising 326% from round 13,000 to almost 57,000 — a determine that has since surged to greater than 84,000 stars.
And then there’s ComfyUI, an open supply node-based program for producing photographs, movies, and audio utilizing generative AI fashions. The undertaking’s GitHub star depend grew 195% to 61,900 stars final 12 months.
Rounding out the highest 5 is All Hands, the corporate behind an open supply platform referred to as OpenHands for constructing software program improvement brokers. OpenHands garnered 39,600 GitHub stars from its launch final March by the top of 2024 and has since added one other 12,000 stars to the combination.
While the ROSS Index for final 12 months illustrates the explosive progress in AI and LLMs, it additionally reveals how developer tooling continues to be scorching on this planet of open supply, with the likes of Zed and Astral’s UV (No. 9) each that includes within the high 10. Elsewhere, the presence of PDF manipulation device Stirling PDF (No. 7), finance administration software program Maybe Finance (No. 8), and distant desktop software program RustDesk (No. 17) suggests privacy-focused self-hostable tooling continues to be in excessive demand.
And Ethereum blockchain-focused Fuel (No. 12) reveals that crypto/web3 is alive and kicking.
Open supply software program by its very nature has at all times been distributed, provided that contributors from all corners of the globe can become involved. This is commonly the case for vendor-led initiatives, too; nonetheless, industrial entities normally have some heart of gravity — even when it simply means the place it has been formally included.
The ROSS Index for final 12 months reveals that San Francisco is dwelling to 6 of the highest 20 ROSS startups, whereas Canada has three, and Europe (U.Ok., Switzerland, Hungary, and Czech Republic), Singapore, and China constituting the remaining.
Methodology
There are different methods of monitoring “scorching” open supply initiatives. Two Sigma Ventures operates the Open Source Index, which is analogous in idea to the ROSS Index besides it showcases the highest 100 initiatives with no particular concentrate on industrial startups (it additionally affords other ways of filtering the information).
And GitHub itself affords a top-trending undertaking listing, once more with out the particular concentrate on industrial companies.
It’s additionally price wanting on the methodology behind the ROSS Index. GitHub “stars” may be an imperfect metric, because it merely reveals that somebody has “favored” the undertaking, versus actively utilizing or monitoring it. Older initiatives will naturally have procured extra “stars,” too, which is why Runa focuses on the relative progress of repositories over a 90-day interval for its quarterly reviews, and on absolutely the variety of new stars gained throughout the 12 months for its annual report.
This additionally signifies that the annual report can look fairly completely different to the quarterly reviews, provided that absolute star counts received’t at all times align with speedy relative-growth patterns.
There may be some points round what’s classed as “open supply.” While most of the initiatives on the listing have certainly been launched beneath a acknowledged copyleft or permissive open supply license, this isn’t a strict stipulation of the ROSS Index. Runa says it adheres to the “industrial notion” of open supply, moderately than the official open supply definition. As such, an organization that has launched its software program beneath the Server Side Public License (SSPL), for example, would nonetheless qualify as open supply, although the Open Source Initiative has not rubberstamped the SSPL as “open supply.”
Still, the Index is a helpful indicator not solely of what sorts of open supply know-how is trending, but additionally what firms try to construct companies atop them.
