COSS Weekly, Issue #14: January 31st, 2021
Welcome to the fourteenth issue of the COSS Weekly, the global Commercial Open-Source ecosystem newsletter brought to you every Sunday by Joseph Jacks and team at COSS.Community, OSS Capital and the organizers of Open Core Summit.
Each week, we neatly summarize the latest happenings in COSS, often including objective commentary across primarily the following four areas: Funding, Content, Liquidity, Data.
💰 COSS Funding
Sources say Databricks, building a unified platform for data, AI, and analytics, is raising $2B in a new funding round led by Franklin Templeton that will value the company at $29B post-money. Link
Vectorized, creating an Intelligent Data API Platform, announces $15.5 million in a combination of Seed-Series A funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Link
Unfolded.ai, creating a backend-as-a-service for geospatial applications built on Kepler.gl, announces $6M seed led by Shvet Jain at S28 Capital. Link
Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of CentOS, announces Ctrl IQ — a sponsor and parent company for the upcoming Rocky Linux distribution — with $4M in Series A funding. Link
January 2021 marks the first month in history where total announced COSS funding exceeds $600M (not including the ~$2B Databricks round). Here's the data. Link
📚 COSS Content
Europe's big four telecom companies (Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Vodafone, and Orange) publish a joint memorandum calling for Open RAN, an open standard for the 5G network. Link
COSS is coming to Clubhouse! Every Friday at 5:30PM PST, the COSS Builders room will be hosted by Joseph Jacks and Kevin Xu. Join the conversation! Link
SSPL Re-Takes the Stage in 2021 by Heather Meeker. Link
Explore all of the OCS 2020 Keynotes and Breakout sessions on COSS.community! Link
Learn about Airbyte, building an open-source data pipeline platform, and an OSS alternative to Fivetran and Stitchdata. Link
"There is a vigorous debate underway on the definition of open source: how to distinguish 'true' from 'real' open-source?" Observations and discussion from Solomon Hykes. Link
How the pandemic is accelerating enterprise open-source adoption. Link
Intel paid $740M for 18% of Cloudera back in 2014. Last month, Intel sold back their stake to Cloudera for $314M. Over last 7 years, Cloudera grew ARR from $100M to $1B. This story is far from over. Link
Patrick O'Shaughnessy discusses big data, storage, networking, and the data ecosystem with Ali Ghodsi (CEO of Databricks). Link
Confluent's Erica Schultz and Elastic's Justin Hoffman share concrete advice for today's OSS leaders at Index Open Source Summit 2021 (Tuesday, February 9th). Link
Observing the geo-diversity of today's six public COSS companies: Elastic (Netherlands), Cloudera (Silicon Valley), MongoDB (New York). Fastly (Denmark), Talend (France), JFrog (Israel). Link
New Relic announces The Relicans, becoming the first public company on Forem. Link
"COSS companies represent a form of fighting against inequality. FOSS value has vastly been captured by companies who don't create or contribute to open source. COSS companies employ and are started by creators of open source, enabling direct and aligned value capture." — Joseph Jacks. Link
💸 COSS Liquidity
Snyk announces acquisition of Manifold, to help accelerate the extensibility of Snyk's platform. Link
Datastax announces acquisition of Kesque, a cloud messaging service built on Apache Pulsar, and launch of Pulsar-based streaming platform: Datastax Luna Streaming. Link
20 potential COSS IPOs on the 6-12-18-24 month horizon: Confluent, CockroachDB, Dremio, Databricks, DataStax, ForgeRock, Grafana, GitLab, HashiCorp, JetBrains, Kong, Lifreay, Neo4J, Odoo, PingCAP, Redis Labs, Starburst Data, Sysdig, and more! Link
📈 COSS Data
- 🌐 YC COSS: For the first time ever in 2020, 15~ COSS startups have gone through YC in a single year representing 30%+ of the total (50~ since 2006). Our YC COSS dataset tracks and provides granular data on the growing but still small COSS YC alumni.
- 🏦 COSS PE Funding: This dataset tracks the latest funding events for all stages of COSS companies, mostly in private markets, for 2020-2021+.
- 📊 COSS Index: The well-known COSSI sheet for the exclusive $100M+ revenue club of COSS companies. New data points and growth happening weekly.
- 🌩️ AWS COSS: List of COSS services on AWS. Continuously evolving. We plan to offer similar datasets for Azure, GCP, and other major clouds.
- 📈 COSS IPO: Analysis of every COSS IPO since 1999.
COSS Weekly is brought to you via COSS.Community, produced by OSS Capital (the first and only COSS-dedicated early-stage investor platform for COSS founders)
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