A brand new report showcases the 20 top-trending open supply startups around the globe, greater than half of that are intently aligned with AI.
The report is the handiwork of European enterprise capital agency Runa Capital, which has operated the Runa Open Supply Startup (ROSS) Index since 2020. The Index serves quarterly updates on the fastest-growing tasks by way of GitHub “stars” — a metric that’s one thing akin to a “like” on social media. Starting in 2023, Runa began producing annual stories, highlighting the preferred industrial open supply startups in a given yr.
Final yr’s report demonstrated that AI and knowledge 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 yr it’s the same story, with AI central to 11 of the highest 20 corporations.
It’s price noting that the ROSS Index is closely curated and doesn’t embody any previous open supply undertaking. Qualifying tasks should be intently linked to a industrial firm (i.e., a vendor-led undertaking), which means no facet tasks. Moreover, these corporations should be youthful than 10 years previous; raised lower than $100 million in funding; and be completely 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 comparable to Meta’s Llama and DeepSeek domestically (i.e., desktop). Ollama’s GitHub star depend elevated by some 76,000 by means of 2024, rising 261% to greater than 105,000 (it has since risen to greater than 135,000 stars over the previous few months).
Subsequent on the checklist 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 yr it gained greater than 52,000 GitHub stars.
In third place is LangGenius, the corporate behind an open supply LLM app growth platform referred to as Dify. The undertaking attained greater than 43,000 new GitHub stars final yr, rising 326% from round 13,000 to almost 57,000 — a determine that has since surged to greater than 84,000 stars.
After which there’s ComfyUI, an open supply node-based program for producing pictures, movies, and audio utilizing generative AI fashions. The undertaking’s GitHub star depend grew 195% to 61,900 stars final yr.
Rounding out the highest 5 is All Palms, the corporate behind an open supply platform referred to as OpenHands for constructing software program growth brokers. OpenHands garnered 39,600 GitHub stars from its launch final March by means of the top of 2024 and has since added one other 12,000 stars to the combination.
Whereas the ROSS Index for final yr illustrates the explosive progress in AI and LLMs, it additionally exhibits how developer tooling continues to be sizzling on the 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 Perhaps 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 Gas (No. 12) exhibits 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 get entangled. That is usually the case for vendor-led tasks, too; nevertheless, industrial entities normally have some middle of gravity — even when it simply means the place it has been formally included.
The ROSS Index for final yr exhibits that San Francisco is residence to 6 of the highest 20 ROSS startups, whereas Canada has three, and Europe (U.Okay., Switzerland, Hungary, and Czech Republic), Singapore, and China constituting the remainder.
Methodology
There are different methods of monitoring “sizzling” open supply tasks. Two Sigma Ventures operates the Open Supply Index, which is analogous in idea to the ROSS Index besides it showcases the highest 100 tasks with out a particular concentrate on industrial startups (it additionally affords other ways of filtering the info).
And GitHub itself affords a top-trending undertaking checklist, once more with out the particular concentrate on industrial companies.
It’s additionally price trying on the methodology behind the ROSS Index. GitHub “stars” will be an imperfect metric, because it merely exhibits that somebody has “appreciated” the undertaking, versus actively utilizing or monitoring it. Older tasks 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 stories, and on absolutely the variety of new stars gained in the course of the yr for its annual report.
This additionally signifies that the annual report can look fairly totally different to the quarterly stories, provided that absolute star counts received’t at all times align with speedy relative-growth patterns.
There can also be some points round what’s classed as “open supply.” Whereas lots of the tasks on the checklist 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, fairly than the official open supply definition. As such, an organization that has launched its software program beneath the Server Aspect Public License (SSPL), for example, would nonetheless qualify as open supply, though the Open Supply Initiative has not rubberstamped the SSPL as “open supply.”
Nonetheless, the Index is a helpful indicator not solely of what sorts of open supply know-how is trending, but additionally what corporations are attempting to construct companies atop them.
