COSS Weekly #28

COSS Weekly, Issue #28: May 9th, 2021

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



Each week, we deliver to you the freshest 😋 weekly news in COSS: Funding, Content, Liquidity and $COSS Public Markets activity.



Public markets were hammered last week, and all the public $COSS companies were sadly not insulated from that. 😓



On a far more positive note, we saw $91M in new funding announcements for Timescale, StarTree, HiveMQ, Portainer, CrowdSec and Rome! 

💰 COSS Funding: $215M 

• Timescale, creators of a popular distributed time-series SQL database built on top of Postgres, announced their $40M Series B led by Redpoint. Link  
• StarTree, the company behind Apache Pinot, a distributed OLAP store, announced their $24M Series A led by Bain Capital and GGV Capital. Link  
• HiveMQ, creators open source and enterprise tools focused on commercializing the MQTT messaging protocol, announced their $11.3M "Seed" round led by Earlybird and Senovo . Link  
• Portainer, creators of their popular open source container management tool, announced their $6M Series A led by BVP. Link  
• CrowdSec, a replacement for Fail2Ban, intrusion prevention software, announced their $5M Seed led by Breega. Link  
• Rome Tools, creators of Rome, a linter, compiler, bundler, and more for JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, HTML, Markdown, and CSS, designed to replace Babel, ESLint, webpack, Prettier, Jest, and others, announced their $4.5M Seed co-led by A Capital and OSS Capital (👋🏼). Link

📚 COSS Content

• JJ thinks the App-Layer COSS foodgates have burst! Link 🌊  
• JJ thinks COSS startups (and every startup) that is community driven should select and invite the top non-employee stakeholders in their respective ecosystems to participate in low-friction equity upside (addressing startup cap table equity exclusivity issues that cause further wealth inequality), offering some ideas on how to implement this. Link 🧑‍🤝‍🧑  
• JJ pointed out that DEV.to (COSS social network platform based on Forem) has more traffic and is growing faster than Product Hunt. Link 🔥  
• ACG Partners, a leading investment bank and research firm, published one of the first "COSS industry" reports, listing OSS Capital as the newest and most active COSS focused investor alongside Accel, Sequoia, Insight Partners, A16z, Coatue and others. Link 💰  
• DROdio, co-founder of Armory, and Ed Sim, co-founder of Boldstart, discuss COSS business models and more. Link 🎤  
• New Relic open sourced Pixie, one of their recent COSS acquisitions (a tool for troubleshooting Kubernetes applications). Link 🌎  
• Deb Bryant, Red Hat's head of OSPO (open source program office), joined the SDxCentral podcast to discuss her views on the history of open source. Link 🔥  
• Jon Natkins of Fishtown Analytics worked with OpenView Venture Partners to create a piece on when to monetize open source. Link

💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)

• No acquisitions, mergers, IPOs or such events occurred last week. 🤷

📊 $COSS - Public Markets:

• ForgeRock's $3-4B IPO is coming! Link  
• Awesome $QTCOM analysis covering 20 years of public stock trends. Link  
• Kaltura's going for round-two of trying to public! Link  
• The total value of all nine (9) public COSS companies is now $130B~ (worth noting that this is not based on the Koyfin data below but based on the actual enterprise value -- we will post next week with more clarity on how we compute the total value of $COSS).  
• Last week, $COSS dropped by another -13%. 😬  
• Latest $COSS snapshot as of market close on May 7th, 2021 provided below (Koyfin-generated).