COSS Weekly, Issue #42: August 15th, 2021
Here's the forty-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).
This last week saw $90.8M in funding for Snorkel AI, Chatwoot, and Neuron7, a new brand and vision for Redis, and discussions on the evolution of business models and value capture from across the space.
Enjoy!
💰 COSS Funding: $90.8M
Snorkel AI, creating a programmatic approach to labeling and managing the data at the heart of AI development, announced their $85M Series C at $1B valuation led by Blackrock and Addition. Link
Chatwoot, an open-source customer engagement challenger to ZenDesk, announced their $1.6M seed led by Goat Capital. Link
Neuron7, a suite of open-source AI tools for field services, announced their $4.2M seed led by Nexus Venture Partners and Battery Ventures. Link
📚 COSS Content
JJ: "Every company on earth wants to be community-driven. Best way to get there? Embrace open source by creating and contributing to it as a CORE strategy!" Link
JJ: "Huge congrats to my friend @pranavrajs and team @chatwootapp on their $1.6M seed! SUPER exciting project. Excited to see @justinkan get into COSS." Link
Balaji Srinivasan: "Technology risk: Can we build it? Market risk: We can build it, but will people buy it? Political risk: We can build it, and we know people will buy it, but will they ban it?" Link
^ JJ response: "Open source mitigates almost ALL these risks. Open source mitigates costly tech dev. Open source dramatically reduces CAC. Open source is fundamentally sanction-resistant and borderless." Link
Kaleidos Open Source: "When a company gives its team the freedom to build their own tools, amazing things come out of it, like @penpotapp and @taigaio. @diacritica, CEO at Kaleidos, tells @GetFlagsmith on this podcast how our design and project management tools were born." Link
JJ: "From open source to commercially viable with the awesome Asim Aslam (Founders Talk #77) // @changelog." Link
Adam Jacob: "Here is the open source business model (yes, open source isn't a business model. But we say that all the time, so.. whatever). Make something great. Turn it into a product that only you can sell (by packaging it up, branding it, selling it)." Link
JJ: "You don't say..." [in response to TechCrunch article VCs are betting big on Kubernetes: Here are 5 reasons why] Link
JJ: "Congrats to SnorkelAI, the latest (of many) COSS Unicorns." Link
Facebook Engineers: "Facebook engineers have built the Open Compute Time Appliance, including Time Card, a PCIe card that can turn almost any commodity server into a time appliance. We've open-sourced the schematics, mechanics, and source code so you can build one yourself!! https://engineering.fb.com/2021/08/11/open-source/time-appliance/." Link
GitLab: "We are excited to be #11 on the @Forbes 2021 @cloud100! https://forbes.com/cloud100/#47fe." Link
ANTIREZ: "Redis Labs changes company name to just "Redis" and restates, in times when everybody is moving away even from AGPL, that the Redis OSS Project will remain BSD licensed. A personal thank you to the company for showing with facts what to be committed to OSS means." Link
Chris Dixon: "1/ Topic: Going from Web 2 to Web 3 - "'Your take rate is my opportunity'. (Continue thread)." Link
^ JJ Response: "Web 3 is a part of COSS...from this lens, what Chris says is 👏⚡🔥🌎." Link
Armon Dadgar: "Excited for our first ever 'State of the Cloud' survey. Lots of take always that match anecdotal experience, especially that multi-cloud is real and growing." Link
JJ: "MacKenzie is shipping donations at a pace that almost rivals what COSS companies are globally raising on a monthly basis.⚡" Link
Jack Altman: "There are going to be a crazy number of $50B saas companies in 10 years." Link
^ JJ Response: "Agree. There will also be a crazy number of $10B+ COSS companies in 5 years. Today, there are a dozen ~. In 5 years, there may be 100." Link
VentureBeat: "Neuron7 employs open source AI tools for field service across devices." Link
💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)
- No M&A events occurred last week
📊 $COSS - Public Markets
$COSS markets up 1.68% last week
Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of market close last Friday courtesy of Koyfin.
This issue of COSS Weekly is brought to you by Mayfield Fund
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