A brand new report showcases the 20 top-trending open supply startups all over the world, 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 initiatives when it comes to 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 business open supply startups in a given yr.
Final yr’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 yr it’s an identical 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 initiatives should be intently linked to a business firm (i.e., a vendor-led undertaking), that means no facet initiatives. Moreover, these corporations 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 operating LLMs similar to Meta’s Llama and DeepSeek regionally (i.e., desktop). Ollama’s GitHub star rely elevated by some 76,000 via 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 undertaking has been round for some time, nevertheless it 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 known 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 photographs, movies, and audio utilizing generative AI fashions. The undertaking’s GitHub star rely grew 195% to 61,900 stars final yr.
Rounding out the highest 5 is All Palms, the corporate behind an open supply platform known as OpenHands for constructing software program growth brokers. OpenHands garnered 39,600 GitHub stars from its launch final March via the top of 2024 and has since added one other 12,000 stars to the combo.
Whereas the ROSS Index for final yr illustrates the explosive development in AI and LLMs, it additionally exhibits how developer tooling continues to be sizzling on the earth 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 Possibly 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 all the time been distributed, provided that contributors from all corners of the globe can become involved. That is usually the case for vendor-led initiatives, too; nonetheless, business 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 house 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 “sizzling” open supply initiatives. Two Sigma Ventures operates the Open Supply Index, which has similarities in idea to the ROSS Index besides it showcases the highest 100 initiatives with no particular concentrate on business startups (it additionally affords alternative ways of filtering the info).
And GitHub itself affords a top-trending undertaking listing, once more with out the precise concentrate on business companies.
It’s additionally price trying on the methodology behind the ROSS Index. GitHub “stars” could be an imperfect metric, because it merely exhibits 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 development of repositories over a 90-day interval for its quarterly experiences, and on absolutely the variety of new stars gained in the course of the yr for its annual report.
This additionally implies that the annual report can look fairly completely different to the quarterly experiences, provided that absolute star counts gained’t all the time align with speedy relative-growth patterns.
There might also be some points round what’s classed as “open supply.” Whereas lots of the initiatives on the listing have certainly been launched underneath a acknowledged copyleft or permissive open supply license, this isn’t a strict stipulation of the ROSS Index. Runa says it adheres to the “business notion” of open supply, relatively than the official open supply definition. As such, an organization that has launched its software program underneath the Server Facet Public License (SSPL), for example, would nonetheless qualify as open supply, although 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 in addition what corporations are attempting to construct companies atop them.
