Here's the two-hundred seventeenth 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 $52M in funding announcements from ROOST (Robust Open Only Safety Tools) and Bittensor, exciting news from Latent Holdings, updates from ForwardEmail, Cal.com, ResearchHub, Dub.co, Cap, & Wayfinder, and more!
Enjoy!
💰 COSS Funding: $52M
ROOST, an industry initiative to build resilient infrastructure in the AI era, launched with $27M in funding from Google, Discord, Roblox, OpenAI, and more. Link
JJ: "On the heels of dTAO merging today, I'm pleased to share that @OSSCapital is doubling our commitment, bringing our total investment in Bittensor to $50M. This represents (even well before this tweet) the largest investment in Bittensor since the launch of the protocol. We also continue to aggressively scale our open source contributions at @LatentHoldings (see reply tweet for a list of everything we have been shipping since forming Latent a couple months ago) --- which maintains the Bittensor SDK, CLI, core docs and more. Onwards! $TAO" Link
📚 COSS Content
JJ: "Exciting announcement (they just keep coming): Today we are thrilled to share that @LatentHoldings has acquired @LearnBittensor, while retaining @mcjkula's leadership and vision. As our "Head of Education", Maciej will continue driving Learn Bittensor's mission to simplify access to knowledge around Bittensor, ensuring the platform remains a trusted and objective resource. We are extremely focused to lower ALL barriers of entry and friction for anyone wanting to learn about or contribute to decentralized and open source AI. LearnBittensor.org" Link
Laτenτ Holdings: "Excited to announce Xavier Lyu has joined our founding team at @LatentHoldings! @xavi3rlu will lead research initiatives, such as Bittensor subnet incentive design, dTAO tokenomics, and more. Previously, he was a core contributor to the dTAO design and whitepaper as a researcher at @opentensor. He also brings valuable experience from Pantera Capital where he worked as a quant developer and fundamental investment analyst. Welcome aboard, Xavier!" Link
Bailey Pumfleet: "The first sales call at @calcom: A 17-year-old me talking to a top company CEO. Zero clue about "proper sales techniques" or whatever. Just straight up told him: "Your scheduling system sucks, and we can fix it." He laughed and signed up on the spot. I was never good at memorizing things in school, and I definitely couldn't learn a sales script to save my life. And I think this actually gave me an advantage over guys who were years ahead of me in the sales game. I was young, naive, but I didn't even try to sugarcoat it. I said what everyone thought but was too "professional" to say." Link
JJ: "'No real AI innovation comes from China' ... Fact: ResNet is the most cited AI paper in history by far (250K+ citations) and was written by Chinese authors in China: Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, Jian Sun. arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385" Link
Ken Jon: "Open source will win @shibshib89 cointelegraph.com/news/deep-seek..." Link
Nothing: "Intricate. From the inside-out." Link
Richie - oss/acc: "ok we have some absolutely HUGE things launching for @Cap later this month... everything is so exciting right now. so much is happening or has happened. I'm just going to leave a series of emojis here to tease." Link
JJ: "Open source ate YC." Link
Forward Email: "We boosted server performance 573%+ and cut our hosting bill in half... How? It's simple: We switched from Digital Ocean (Premium Intel + Block Storage) to @DataPacketcom (@AMDRyzen + NVMe SSD) Blazing fast @nodejs + SQLite powered mailboxes github.com/forwardemail/s..." Link
τao τemplar: "Bittensor TAO - Full Miner Course This long-awaited course is finally here, and FREE! We dive into mining #bittensor $TAO. A full course going over every single step of the setup." Link
Didier Lopes: "ICYMI: We have partnered with the International Association for Quantitative Finance. 7,000 students from 28 different US universities will now be able to access OpenBB workspace with no restrictions. Looking forward to learning what students are researching and analyzing on OpenBB." Link
OMEGA Labs, Inc.: "BREAKING: SN21 miners just matched GPT-4o on voice + video capabilities while keeping it 100% open source. The gap between open- and closed-source models is quickly narrowing, first in the reasoning domain and now across the fully multimodal any-to-any frontier. Benchmarks: Matching GPT-4o on OpenCompass. Exceeding all of the opensource models on voice2voice Leading on AI2D visual reasoning Real-time video comprehension at scale Try it on sn21.ai" Link
Bailey Pumfleet: "We have no sales team. But we're scaling faster than our competitors. Here's how we actually scale... Traditional SaaS playbook: - Hire huge sales team - Push features nobody wants - Upsell aggressively Our playbook: - Build incredible product - Let users sell for us - Ship faster than competitors Our numbers don't lie: Lower customer acquisition cost, Higher user satisfaction, Better retention Our secret weapon? Our change log is our best salesperson. New features every week. Real solutions to real problems. No fluff, no BS. The result? Users come to us. Word of mouth explodes. Sales happen naturally. All because we focused on product, not pitches." Link
Steven Tey: "Good news: We're rolling out early access to Folders on @dubdotco -- a better way to organize your links and manage user access. Initial feedback from beta testers: ◆ "This is GOLD" ◆ "OBSESSED" ◆ "The. F*cking. Dream." Wanna try it out? Drop a emoji and I'll flag you in." Link
Laτenτ Holdings: "UPDATE --- here's a high level changelog of what our team has been shipping for Bittensor since forming Latent a couple months ago: - RAO: an entire rewrite of bittensor (for dynamic TAO) and btcli are releasing today, but our core team started on a lot of this work a bit earlier than Latent formed, while at @opentensor - bt-decode 0.5.0 --- allows for decoding arbitrary SCALE objects from the chain, as defined in the chain metadata - async-substrate-interface 1.0.0 --- rewrite of py-substrate-interface, with sync+async versions, uses bt-decode 0.5.0 - bittensor's
SubtensorandAsyncSubtensorclasses have all the same methods, and both utilise async-substrate-interface 1.0.0 (which in turn uses bt-decode 0.5.0 - major updates to bittensor-wallet - more than 100,000 shiny new lines of core developer documentation for the RAO upgrade: refactoring / reconceptualizing terminology in core docs and maturing the conceptual framing of many concepts" LinkJJ: "dTAO FAQ: docs.bittensor.com/dynamic-tao/dt..." Link
Vamsi Kurama: "Plane is a work and project management software that grows with you and your team. A startup can start with a lean, clutter-free setup, then progressively enable advanced layers as their team and needs expand. This modular, lego-like approach means you only see the features you need, keeping the UX clean and performance fast. By contrast, other tools often present a maze of options (with many add-ons) that can slow down teams. @planepowers offers power when you need it, and simplicity when you don't." Link
Eric Migicovsky: "Guess which Blackberry patent expires on Saturday...." Link
Rayon Labs: "Chutes Continues to be the Largest Provider of DeepSeek R1 (free) on @OpenRouterAI, now providing over 2 BILLION tokens every day, and climbing. - The fastest Tokens/s for R1 (free), over DOUBLING other decentralized providers - Day on day increase of >82% tokens processed for OpenRouter clients - More tokens processed for DeepSeek R1 (free) than any other provider Discover our models available on OpenRouter here: openrouter.ai/provider/chutes #chutes #bittensor #dtao #subnet64" Link
Maciej Kula: "I am honored to join @latentholdings as the "Head of Education" and make learnbittensor.org the go-to resource for everyone in Bittensor and around it. Thanks to everyone that supported me and helped me to get here, but don't think I will stop pushing!" Link
Wayfinder Foundation: "Upgrading the user experience with better thinking and message replacement in the chat. The status animation is so clean" Link
Peer Richelsen --- oss/acc: "wow what a release crazy how much has changed since v4.0 to v5.0 super pumped about @calcom v5.0 introducing Cal.com/Routing cal.com/blog/v-5" Link
Bailey Pumfleet: "I am incredibly proud to announce Cal.com v5.0: one of our biggest releases yet With 5.0 comes the launch of our Routing product, the open-source Chilipiper successor It's trending #1 on Product Hunt. Check us out: producthunt.com/posts/cal-com-..." Link
ResearchHub: "ResearchHub author profiles showcase reputation, achievements, and impact." Link
JJ: ""If you train on the open web, your model should be open source" --- @naval Strong, strong agree with this. In ALL cases." Link
JJ: "Entering @OSSCapital's 7th year and we're still the only investment / incubation firm (we've helped incorporate > 40 companies) exclusively focused on open source founders. I remain shocked nobody copies us especially as the world accelerates toward open source faster than ever." Link
JJ: "When we started, investing in open source founders was extremely niche. It is now mainstream. There is not a single VC in the world without at least several open source founders in their portfolio. What is still missing is the same conviction we have ... absolute dedication." Link
💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)
- Beff -- e/acc: "An Open Source model release literally took $1T+ of market cap from American stocks and ported it into Chinese stocks. Clearly OSS AI models have massive latent economic value." Link
🛠️ COSS Jobs
- 5,617 jobs and 330 companies hiring! Link
📊 $COSS - Public Markets
- $COSS markets up 1.25% last week
- Latest $COSS markets as of last Friday at market close, courtesy of Koyfin
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