COSS Weekly, Issue #41: August 8th, 2021
Here's the forty-first 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).
This last week saw $20M in funding for Ahana, a new joint venture from Ursa Computing, RapidsAI, and BlazingSQL (Voltron Data), and Checkmarx's acquisition of open-source security solution Dustico.
Enjoy!
💰 COSS Funding: $20M
Ahana, transforming open data lake analytics, announced their $20M Series A led by Third Point Ventures. Link
Automattic, the COSS company behind WordPress.com (and many others), invests in email startup Titan at a $300 million valuation. Link
📚 COSS Content
Jeff Meyerson: "May: ideate. 16: arrive home from @beondeck. 17: create first pitch deck for Supercompute. June: iterate. July: raise. 7:@hosseeb invests. 8: @djrosent invests. 13: @OSSCapital invests, 19: @OSSCapital doubles down, taking 2/3 of our round. 20: @nickdaigler joins as CTO. Aug: launch." Link
JJ: "Transparency is the new Stealthy." Link
Parallel: "[PRSYS] 'Perseus' is done shipping less the stragglers! Worked as intended but needs some adjustments to decentralize [RNG] and improve it for next drop. We are considering the possibility of open sourcing it for everyone to use once we are done building it out. " Link
Open Source: The Last Patent Defense? by Heather Meeker. Link
Ziyue (Zoe) Li: "I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. @hxiao, founder & CEO of @JinaAI_- an open-source neural search company based in Berlin and Beijing. Founded in Feb. 2020, Jina AI has closed the seed & Pre-A in 6 months with $7.5M." Link
Parallel: "PlayFi = Games + NFTs + DeFi " Link
JJ: "Congrats to the rain man. It's VERY baller that Sequoia and A16z had to mark David's Series B in @sourcegraph up something like 26X in a year, IIRC... COSS and SaaS can co-exist in harmony. 🤓 🔥" Link
Utsav Shah: "Software at Scale 29 - @ssougou: CTO, @planetscaledata. We discuss: Early days at PayPal and YouTube and getting hired by @elonmusk. Building @vitessio to solve database scalability at YouTube. Technical innovation at @planetscaledata and more!" Link
Query GitHub With SQL - AskGit can now hit the GitHub API. Link
GGV Capital: "How did a recipe search app lead to a world-class phenomenon and one of the world's largest distributed companies? @glennsolomon and @YungerOren find out from @kimchy of @elastic on the latest #FounderRealTalk #podcast episode." Link
JJ: "Congratulations @jossefharush and Tzachi Zornstein (founders of @DusticoSec) on their acquisition by @Checkmarx https://checkmarx.com/press-releases." Link
Brandon Savage: "My company, Tailwinds, is going to contribute a sum each month to developers of open source software. Since we use pretty much all open source software (that's how consulting works), we need your help picking the software. What is your favorite open source to support?" Link
Alyssa X: "What if @googlemapshad real-time collaboration? Mapus is a free & open source tool to explore and annotate collaboratively on a map Draw, add markers, create lines and areas, find places to go, observe other users, and much more.@github https://github.com/alyssaxuu/mapus." Link\
Matt Mullenweg: "Automattic invests in email startup Titan at a $300 million valuation https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-03/automattic-values-business-email-startup-titan-at-300-million via @technology." Link
peerrich.com: "Not a single day passes without @calendso getting more useful or just simply more beautiful#proud magnificent work @CiaranHan." Link
Cloud Blockchains by Jeff Meyerson. Link
The Economist: "Open-source intelligence is increasingly capable of questioning the narratives spread by states such as North Korea, China and Russia" Link
Techmeme: "Mapbox workers voted against a union 123-81, after the company forced a formal vote on whether workers wanted to form a union allied with CWA (@anna_c_kramer/ Protocol)". Link
Forem: "A HUGE congrats to Chua Hua Lun for their project being named the "Best Forem Community" for @MLHacks #SelfieHacks. Learn all about their award-winning #Forem community, 'All Together!'" Link
JJ: "In only 60 days,@NocoDB has established itself as the fastest growing open source project in the world, rocketing to 16,000+ stars --- democratizing smart spreadsheets for all." Link
Syrus Akbary: "#OpenSource projects are quite interesting to analyze. It took @NocoDB 2 years to achieve 6,000 stars and just 2 months to 10,000 more. Explosive growth comes from consistency." Link
Rancher Labs: "What's it like starting an #opensource company? Rancher Labs cofounder and @SUSE president of engineering and #innovation @shengliang shares #startup stories and offers advice for would-be #founders in the latest episode of the #OCTOpod. Listen now!" Link
Jeffrey Meyerson: Don't Trust Facebook (video on the threat of React, if continued under Facebook ownership). Link
Rome Tools: "Rome is hiring Rust developers to help us rewrite Rome in Rust! We are looking for experienced Rust engineers interested in developer tooling and open source. Entirely remote with competitive compensation and benefits. Apply at https://rome-tools-inc.breezy.hr/." Link
Nocodb: "Here is some news folks. @nocodb crossed one million docker downloads in less than just 10 weeks since the launch!" Link
Umbrel: "It's time. Starting today, Umbrel isn't just a #Bitcoin node. It's a personal server OS that empowers anyone to reclaim ownership of their data & become a self-sovereign citizen of the internet. Introducing Umbrel 0.4. This changes everything. Again. https://blog.getumbrel.com/introducing-umbrel-v0-4-e5b67d02c43a." Link
Identifying Recently Active Git Contributors. Using a bit of SQL to find the most *recently active git contributors to an open-source codebase* by AskGit. Link
Athens: "3 months ago we raised $1.9M. Big updates since then: TLDR: Built epic team. Pivot from PKM, creating new category CKM. New vision: a Collective Brain, sort of a social network for learning, collaboration, innovation. Start w/ moonshot research teams. (Continue thread)." Link
Heavybit: "With great power comes great responsibility. Category creation isn't about your business and serving only your users, it's about enabling and empowering the whole ecosystem. Hear more about why investing in open source tooling is important for @DataStax. https://bit.ly/3f5UlG5." Link
💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)
Wes McKinney: "The @ursacomputing team and I have joined forces with @datametrician, @blazingsql and other open source pioneers to create @VoltronData to work for the future of analytics built on @ApacheArrow! " Link
Checkmarx, a leader in dev-centric application security testing (AST) solutions, has acquired Dustico, a SaaS-based security solution for open source software supply chains. Link
Jay Kreps: "First earnings: 64% year-over-year growth in total revenue, 200% (!) year-over-year growth in Confluent Cloud. A huge thanks to all our customers, employees, partners, and investors! Onward!" Link
📊 $COSS - Public Markets
- $COSS markets up 0.43% last week
Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of market close last Friday courtesy of Koyfin
This issue of COSS Weeklyis brought to you by Mayfield Fund
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