COSS Weekly #36

COSS Weekly, Issue #36: July 5th, 2021 

Here's the thirty-sixth 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).



Last week we witnessed another $176M in new funding announcements, with Brad Gerstner's Altimeter Capital leading a $150M Series C in the company behind dbt (data build tool), a solution enabling data analysts and engineers to transform their data using the same practices that software engineers use to build applications!



GitLab also spun-out the Meltano ETL project as a standalone company, backed by GV.

 

💰 COSS Funding: $176M

• Viam Robotics, founded by Eliot Horowitz (former MongoDB co-founder/CTO), is building open-source hardware, software, and services for the future of robotics, announced their $12M Seed round led by Fred Wilson at USV. Link   
• dbt Labs, previously known as Fishtown Analytics and makers of the dbt analytics engineer workflow, announced their $150M Series C led by Altimeter. Link  
• Meltano, a GitLab spin-out building a platform for ELT pipelines , announced their $4.2M Seed round led by GV. Link  
• Checkly, building a reliability automation platform for developers, announced their $10M Series A led by CRV. Link

📚 COSS Content

• Sebastian McKenzie and Jamie Kyle (Rome Tools) speak on PodRocket. Link  
• Albert Wenger (USV) shares perspective on Viam Robotics investment. Link  
• Discussion on GitHub Copilot's use of GPL code into a commercial work. Link  
• Matt Asay (AWS Cloud): Another day, another multi-billion dollar IPO for open source. Link  
• Grafana CEO Raj Dutt and k6 CEO Robin Gustafsson discuss the acquisition of k6 by Grafana and the future of both products. Link  
• Tim Berners-Lee's NFT representing original web source code and other artifacts from the invention of the web sells for $5.4M. Link  
• Catch the AMA with Andrew Bastin, maintainer of Hoppscotch. Link  
• Merico shares lessons from Building in Public. Link  
• The New Business of Open Source—Monetizing Frameworks. Link  
• Permission Beyond Licensing from Simon Phipps. Link  
• From RabbitMQ to GitOps with Alexis Richardson, on the Committing to Cloud Native Podcast. Link  
• Road to Noovolari by Nicolò Marchesi, on COSS.community. Link

💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)

• Couchbase's S-1 Analytics from Astasia Myers (Redpoint) Link  
• Initial thoughts on Instructure's initial filing for IPO from Phil Hill. Link  

📊 $COSS - Public Markets

• $COSS rose again last week by 0.92%  
• Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of close today courtesy of Koyfin.  
• We are now up to 13 public COSS companies! Corrections to Koyfin data:
  - QTCOM market cap listed at $2.48B (Google)
  - MDB market cap listed at $22.5B (Google)
  - WAND market cap listed at $232M (Google)
  - SUSE market cap listed at $5.713B (Bloomberg)
  - CFLT market cap listed at $10.98B (Google)