The recent report shows the 20 highest open source start-ups around the world, of which greater than half are strictly even with AI.
The report is the work of the European company Venture Capital Runa Capitalwhich supported the startup of the Open Source rune (Ross) Index since 2020. The index supports quarterly updates with the fastest growing projects in terms of “stars” of Github-Wskźnik, which is something much like “similar” in social media. Starting from 2023, Runa began creating annual reports, emphasizing the hottest business business startups of the Open Source in a given yr.
Last yr, the report showed that artificial intelligence and data infrastructure powered the demand for open source equipment, with (*20*)Langchain BRAKING TO PEOPLE IN THE ROSS Index for its Open Source structure for building applications focused on LLM.
This yr it is a similar story, from Central AI to 11 out of 20 best firms.
It is price noting that the ROSS index is heavily chosen and does not contain any old Open Source project. Qualifying projects have to be closely related to a business company (i.e. a project managed by a supplier), which implies no side projects. In addition, these firms have to be younger than 10 years old; collected financing lower than $ 100 million; And be completely independent – so not a subsidiary or publicly mentioned.
Stargazing
There is in the highest place on the Ross 2024 index Ollamcombinator y alum This was built tool Open Source to start out LLM, equivalent to Lama Meta Lila and Gepseek locally (i.e. desktop). Ollam Number of GitHub stars Increased by about 76,000 to 2024, it grows by 261% to over 105,000 (since then it has increased to over 135,000 stars in the last few months).
Next on the list is Zed IndustriesCOLLABORATIVE CODE COLLABLATOR EDITOR “designed for high -performance cooperation with people and AI”. Zed Project has been around for some time, but yes Only Open Source went in January 2024 and for the rest of the yr he gained greater than 52,000 GitHub stars.
In third place LanggeniusThe company standing behind the Open Source LLM application development platform called Diffusing. The project reached over 43,000 recent ones GitHub Stars Last yr, an increase of 326% from around 13,000 to almost 57,000 – a number that has increased to over 84,000 stars since then.
And then it is ComfyuiA program based on open source nodes for generating images, movies and sound using generative AI models. Design Number of GitHub stars 195% to 61,900 stars grew up last yr.
The rounding of the top five is All handsAn organization standing behind an open source platform called Open – to build software development agents. Openhands won 39,600 Github stars from the premiere of last yr to the end of 2024 and since then added one other 12,000 stars to the mix.
While the ROSS index for last yr illustrates an explosive growth in artificial intelligence and LLM, also shows how programmers’ equipment is still hot in the world of open source, with equivalent to ZED and UV Astral (No. 9) Both containing in the top ten. Elsewhere the presence of pdf manipulation tools Stirling pdf (No. 7), Finance management software Maybe finance (No. 8) and distant desktop software Rustdesk (No. 17) suggests that privacy -oriented equipment is still sought after.
And focused on Ethereum blockchain Fuel (No. 12) shows that Crypto/Web3 is alive and copies.
Open Source software has at all times been distributed, considering that participants from all corners of the globe can get involved. This is also often the case in the case of projects managed by suppliers; However, business entities often have a certain center of gravity – even if it means where it was formally turned on.
Last yr, the ROSS index shows that San Francisco has six of Ross’s 20 best startups, while Canada has three, and Europe (Great Britain, Switzerland, Hungary and the Czech), Singapore and China constituting the rest.
Methodology
There are other ways to follow “hot” open source projects. Two Sigma Ventures works Open Source indexWhat is much like the ROSS index concept, except that it presents the 100 best projects without a specific concentration at business startups (also offers various ways of data filtering).
And Github itself offers The best list of projectsAgain, without a specific pressure on business firms.
It is also price looking at methodology Behind the ROSS index. Github “Stars” might be an imperfect indicator, because it only shows that somebody “liked” the project, unlike energetic use or monitoring. Older projects may also naturally acquire more “stars”, which is why the rune focuses on the relative development of repositories inside 90 days in its quarterly reports and on the absolute number of recent stars obtained during the yr in its annual report.
It also implies that the annual report may look completely different than quarterly reports, taking into account that the absolute number of stars won’t at all times be in line with fast growth patterns.
There may be some problems around what is classified as “open source”. Although many projects on the list were actually released in the recognized Copyleft or the permissible Open Source license, this is not a strict reservation of the ROSS index. Runa says that he warns the “commercial perception” of Open Source, not The official definition of Open Source. As such, a company that has published its software as part of a public license on the server side (SSPL), For example, he would still qualify as open source, though Open Source initiative didn’t understand SSPL as “Open Source”.
Despite this, the index is a useful indicator not only of this sort of open source technology, but also what firms are attempting to build firms on their basis.