COSS Weekly, Issue #32: June 6th, 2021
Here's the thirty-second issue of COSS Weekly, the global commercial open source (COSS) company category newsletter, brought to you every Sunday afternoon (Pacific Time) 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, Liquidity and $COSS (Public Markets).
Coming off an epic last week: A tale of two "big data" platforms... Cloudera, known for Hadoop (largely data at rest) and Confluent, known for Kafka (largely data in motion) have both reached significant milestones in their respective evolutions:
Confluent officially released their full S-1 to all and revealed they plan to go public on a $300M+ revenue run-rate, growing 50%+ YoY overall. 80%~ of that revenue is subscription licensed "on-prem" product sales, and 20%~ is Cloud/SaaS (growing 120%+ YoY).
We'll see how the public equity stock markets price Confluent overall, but based on current multiples, we suspect the world will soon be welcoming another public $10B+ COSS decacorn alongside MongoDB and Elastic! Note: Confluent opted for a traditional IPO listing instead of a SPAC or Direct Listing.
On the other end of the spectrum, Cloudera is being taken private on favorable price terms (to perhaps most investors except Intel) at a $5.3B price by KKR and CD&R. Public markets have not been kind to Cloudera since their mid 2017 IPO which initially priced the company at $2.5B~ where the price hovered (albeit in a highly volatile way) over the successive 3 years until recently. Over the same period, revenue grew consistently by over 400%!
Last week we also celebrated Golioth, SignalWire and Stemma funding announcements of $37M+! 🔥
💰 COSS Funding: $37.3M
- SignalWire, a cloud communications product company and also the creators of FreeSWITCH, announced their $30M Series B led by Prosperity7 (a venture arm of Saudi Aramco). Link
- Stemma, builders of data catalog tools, powered by Lyft's Amundsen, announced their $4.8M seed round led by Sequoia. Link
- Golioth, a company building commercial support and product around the Zephyr RTOS IoT project, announced their $2.5M seed round led by Zetta. Link
📚 COSS Content
- JJ tagged some of the female COSS founders. Link
- Matt Turck interviewed Ali Ghosdi. Link
- Jamin Ball covered some of the recent performance numbers coming out of MuleSoft (now part of Salesforce since 2018). Link
- More Calendso love from Product Hunt. Link
- Matt Aslett produced a 451 customer piece on Source Available licensing trends. Link
- Sam Scott, Oso co-founder/CTO was interviewed on the DevDiscuss podcast. Link
- Michael Jackson (co-founder of Remix) opined on money and open source. Link
💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)
- Cloudera is being taken private for $5.3B by KKR and CD&R. Link
- Not really COSS, but highly relevant and related: StackOverflow is being acquired by Prosus (part of Naspers) for $1.8B. Link
- Confluent S-1. Link
- ReFirm Labs (creators of firmware analysis tool Binwalk) was acquired by Microsoft. Link
📊 $COSS - Public Markets
- Confluent will be replacing Cloudera soon, so we will have a dozen public COSS companies.
- $COSS went UP last week by 2.4% 📈
- Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of close on June 4th, 2021, courtesy of Koyfin:
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