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 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 experiences, highlighting the most well-liked industrial open supply startups in a given 12 months.
Final 12 months’s report demonstrated that AI and knowledge infrastructure have 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 an identical story, with AI central to 11 of the highest 20 corporations.
It’s value noting that the ROSS Index is closely curated and doesn’t embody any outdated open supply venture. Qualifying tasks have to be carefully linked to a industrial firm (i.e., a vendor-led venture), that means no facet tasks. Moreover, these corporations have to be youthful than 10 years outdated; raised lower than $100 million in funding; and be totally unbiased — so not a subsidiary or publicly listed.
Stargazing
In prime spot on the 2024 ROSS Index is Ollama, a Y Combinator alum that’s constructed an open supply device for working LLMs reminiscent of Meta’s Llama and DeepSeek domestically (i.e., desktop). Ollama’s GitHub star count 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 listing is Zed Industries, a cross-platform collaborative code editor “designed for high-performance collaboration with people and AI.” The Zed venture has been round for some time, but it surely only went open source 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 known as Dify. The venture attained greater than 43,000 new GitHub stars final 12 months, rising 326% from round 13,000 to just about 57,000 — a determine that has since surged to greater than 84,000 stars.
After which there may be ComfyUI, an open supply node-based program for producing photographs, movies, and audio utilizing generative AI fashions. The venture’s GitHub star count grew 195% to 61,900 stars final 12 months.
Rounding out the highest 5 is All Hands, the corporate behind an open supply platform known as OpenHands for constructing software program improvement brokers. OpenHands garnered 39,600 GitHub stars from its launch final March by means of the tip of 2024 and has since added one other 12,000 stars to the combination.
Whereas the ROSS Index for final 12 months illustrates the explosive progress in AI and LLMs, it additionally exhibits how developer tooling continues to be scorching on the earth of open supply, with the likes of Zed and Astral’s UV (No. 9) each that includes within the prime 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) 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 become involved. That is typically the case for vendor-led tasks, too; nonetheless, industrial entities normally have some middle of gravity — even when it simply means the place it has been formally integrated.
The ROSS Index for final 12 months 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 remaining.
Methodology
There are different methods of monitoring “scorching” open supply tasks. Two Sigma Ventures operates the Open Source Index, which has similarities in idea to the ROSS Index besides it showcases the highest 100 tasks with no particular deal with industrial startups (it additionally affords other ways of filtering the information).
And GitHub itself affords a top-trending project list, once more with out the particular deal with industrial companies.
It’s additionally value wanting on the methodology behind the ROSS Index. GitHub “stars” could be an imperfect metric, because it merely exhibits that somebody has “appreciated” the venture, 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 experiences, and on absolutely the variety of new stars gained through the 12 months for its annual report.
This additionally signifies that the annual report can look fairly completely different to the quarterly experiences, provided that absolute star counts gained’t at all times align with fast relative-growth patterns.
There may be some points round what’s classed as “open supply.” Whereas lots of the tasks on the listing have certainly been launched below 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, relatively than the official open source definition. As such, an organization that has launched its software program below the Server Aspect Public License (SSPL), as an illustration, would nonetheless qualify as open supply, though the Open Source 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.