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COSS Weekly #121

Here's the one-hundred twenty-first issue of COSS Weekly, the global commercial open source (COSS) company category newsletter, brought to you every weekend by the team at OSS Capital, creators and stewards of COSS Community and Open Core Summit.

We deliver only the most fresh 😋 news from the previous week in COSS across: Funding, Content, Jobs, Liquidity and $COSS (Public Markets).

Last week saw funding announcements from Wand, a COSS Summer of Code announcement, StabilityAI's acquisition of Clipdrop, Tauri and OpenBB in the stars, a partnership for Godot, and an all-time interview with JJ!

Enjoy!


💰 COSS Funding

  • Wand, an AI illustration tool, announced their Seed led by O'Shaugnessy Ventures. Link
  • JJ: "🔥✨🤓 I'm VERY excited to finally announce that @OSSCapital is open-sourcing (next week!) an invaluable COSS funding database (in partnership with @OSSInsight) that contains 6,000+ data points across hundreds of COSS startups... many years in the making, but we are sharing it... https://t.co/1tJZyUbhlZ https://t.co/uFaANVn65TLink

📚 COSS Content

  • Robby: "Can your open source company raise Series A? We asked 18 of the top open source Series A investors what they want to see in order to lead a $10M - $25M round in today's environment Here's what they said 👇 https://t.co/RTKyB0l5DxLink

  • Matt Asay: "Even for companies that think open source costs more due to security or other concerns, they still plan to use more open source. Why? Speed of development, as a new @linuxfoundation report shows https://t.co/YBNiLZc9KE by @mjasay for @InfoWorldLink

  • Emad: "Most of the arguments against open source AI can be countered by pointing out that the largest Chinese corporates are going open source AI first in their approaches with a deluge of models to come. Inevitable and inexorable, whose open pretrained models do you prefer?" Link

  • JJ: "Huge congrats to @TauriApps on blazing past 60,000 stars. In just a couple short years, the @rustlang community and development space have been touched, moved and inspired by this great project. 😍🔥 ... Tauri is now a top 30 ~ open source project globally https://t.co/Hk4llUh9LA... https://t.co/tGSVWa56LSLink

  • OSS Capital: "🥳 BIG congratulations to @OpenBB_Finance on 20,000 stars from zero just 2 short years ago ✨ 💸 📈 🦋 Investment research analytics for the people, by the people. ♥️ https://t.co/ONDg8IqUl9Link

  • Smoke-away: "This OpenAI arc has been fun, but I'm ready for my StabilityAI arc." Link

  • Godot Engine: "📆 We'll be at #GDC2023 in San Francisco from March 20-24. 🎮 Come to meet the #GodotEngine team and many talented game developers! https://t.co/5XuflTfh3jLink

  • JJ: "The same place Amazon was conceived (D.E. Shaw) just spinned out their first COSS startup (Nix based Flox)... I was thrilled to learn about this early on and help them out a bit. Pretty cool fact!" Link

  • JJ: "I recently learned that the inimitable @benthompson started @stratechery while at @automattic --- one of the most important COSS companies of the last 20 years. https://t.co/Jj0utijYJsLink

  • Wasmer: "🦾 It's not about #WebAssembly, it's about what you can build with it! https://t.co/szeFjoPseZLink

  • OpenBB 🦋: "Today is a landmark day for @openbb_finance as we hit 20k stars! OpenBB was started out of pure interest in financial data. Now we have evolved into an entire movement democratizing and opening access to financial markets, economic data, and advanced analysis techniques! https://t.co/9C9nqKzcOxLink

  • GDQuest: "We're thrilled to announce we'll be collaborating with @W4Games, the company founded by Godot veteran contributors, to help with educational material. Full announcement: https://t.co/a902FjOmd3 This is essential to help more companies adopt Godot." Link

  • AppFlowy: "On #WomensDay, thrilled to introduce new hires, Lu and Yijing, incredible female devs with collectively 17+ years of work experience and expertise in software and design.  Let's celebrate the amazing women shaping the future of open source and being an inspiration to us all! https://t.co/GIZ1jCuvx6Link

  • Theatre.js: "Sneak peek of what's coming to Theatre 🤫🤖 #ai #threejs https://t.co/I15nikt32YLink

  • JJ: "TODAY IS NATIONAL WOMENS DAY 👩🏻‍💻👩🏼‍💻👩🏽‍💻👩🏾‍💻👩🏿‍💻👩‍💻♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️ We should celebrate and honor ALL our amazing women COSS founders! Here's a list 👏🏼 --- @ConfluentInc founder @NehaNarkhede --- @Forem founder @JessLeenyc --- Blue Gecko founder @sarahnovotny --- @SUSE CEO @mdidonato1 ---... https://t.co/RLcj999wxXLink

  • samim: "Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) were designed to unleash musicians' creativity, yet their user experience often feels like operating complex and dull business software or sitting in a fighter jet cockpit. How did we end up with such a disconnect between intention & reality? https://t.co/Ak1eO1eTKbLink

  • JJ: "🔥 How @OSSCapital is reacting to the @SVB_Financial situation: We've advised AGAINST changing banks and instead strongly recommend moving 90%+ of cash to a liquid money market fund backed by US Treasuries --- this should be done before 11AM Pacific tomorrow!" Link

  • DK: "this was a raw and honest look inside the mind of an open source software venture capital zealot! 😝 I hope you enjoy this meet-and-greet where I learned about @JosephJacks_'s radical vision for our open source future https://t.co/y6Iqb34INV https://t.co/sZ8qNzlil5Link

  • JJ: "I was a bit tired and VERY unfiltered (lots of expletives, you've been warned). Here's my latest interview discussing why I am building @OSSCapital, origins of Free Software, the criticality of open source, Nostr, open source AI and many other things... https://t.co/mmRtvbl3vuLink

  • OSS Capital: "OSS is standing by ALL our founders affected by this SVB implosion with new banking and NON-DILUTIVE payroll coverage if needed. https://t.co/3EiWf2HIUnLink

  • Together: "Introducing OpenChatKit. A powerful, open-source base to create chatbots for various applications. Details in 🧵 https://t.co/afbmQqUegNLink

  • JJ: "We @OSSCapital have 10~ companies in our portfolio (most we helped incorporate) directly affected by the SVB implosion... > $60M frozen and > 300 employees at risk! Around 90% of these deposits are "secure" thanks to being insured / in treasures but there's still uncertainty. 🙏🏼" Link

  • JJ: "Embracing Closed AI vs. Open AI may be the most important decision humans make since the origin of our species. Locking down the pace of improvement with business models riddled with perverse incentives like "ChatGPT is fake news but ChatGPT Pro is ground truth" has the potential to hold back the speed of evolution by many generations!" Link

  • JJ: "Prelude #1 by Hector Villa-Lobos. Everyone stay calm. 🧘✌🏼" Link


💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)

  • Stability AI: "Announcement: Stability AI has acquired the industry leader in AI-powered imaging tools @Clipdropapp! We're excited to integrate our generative AI into the Clipdrop platform, enabling our technology to be easily accessible by creators everywhere! https://t.co/cOjnQcKOZdLink

  • JJ: "Big congrats to @mariadb on announcing their largest customer contract ($34M) doing wonders for their share price today. 📈" Link


🛠️ COSS Jobs

  • 3,777 jobs and 268 companies hiring! Link
  • JJ: "📰 ✨ NEWS 👇🏽 THRILLED to announce that @OSSCapital will be launching our own flavor of GSoC (Google Summer of Code) entirely focused on the open source projects in our portfolio. If you are a superstar who would love join us and design/run this for us, DM me! 💕 🚀" Link
  • JJ: "Btw, the world needs 100X more @rustlang developers so we will be prioritizing this language for our first run --- projects that we will focus on: @spacedriveapp @TauriApps @appflowy @nocodb @wasmerio @rustdeskLink
  • Juan Linietsky: "Searches for Godot Engine on LinedkIn keep growing. We recently started thinking about having a platform to make it easier for companies to post Godot related jobs.. https://t.co/NgJIht9ojcLink

📊 $COSS - Public Markets

  • $COSS markets down 9.22% last week

  • Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of market close last Friday courtesy of Koyfin.

Koyfin market data

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