COSS Weekly, Issue #16: February 16th, 2021
Welcome to the sixteenth issue of the COSS Weekly, the global Commercial Open-Source ecosystem newsletter brought to you every week by Joseph Jacks and the team at COSS.Community, OSS Capital and Open Core Summit.
Each week, we neatly summarize the latest happenings in COSS, often including objective commentary across primarily the following areas: Funding, Content, Liquidity, Data.
💰 COSS Funding
Prefect, building a data workflow management system, announces $11.5M Series A led by Positive Sum. Link
FingerprintJS, focused on fingerprinting-as-a-service, announces $8M Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners. Link
Soda, bringing everyone closer to trusted data, announces €11.5M Series A led by Singular. Link
ProcessMaker, maker of no-code automation software, announces $45M Series A led by Aldrich Capital Partners. Link
📚 COSS Content
All sessions and content from Open Core Summit 2020 now available on COSS.community! Link
Maxim Wheatley: Honored to be sharing the stage with Joseph Jacks, Kevin Xu, Mitchell Hashimoto, and so many other sharp innovative minds on COSS Builders on Clubhouse! Link
Prefect is ready for Liftoff! See the preview of Prefect's upcoming announcements, including fundraising, product vision, partnerships, and community programs. Link
Catch the replay of Index Ventures Open Source Summit. Link
"I had no intention (literally ZERO intention) of ever building a business around my early open source tools. People think 'oh it must've crossed your mind' and honestly, it did not. I built tools to solve my own problems first, HashiCorp came unexpectedly second." - Mitchell Hashimoto (Founder of HashiCorp). Link
OSSBets and Interview with Higinio ("H.O.") Maycotte, co-founder and CEO of Molecula. Link
Read GitLab's Out of the office report, detailing the world's adaptation to remote work in 2020. Link
Jina AI launches Jina 1.0 - an easier way to build neural search on the cloud. Link
JJ: COSS companies are a great path for many FOSS creators, but not all. We need a Shopify for the long-tail FOSS creators... what if you had a streamlined platform that enabled you to directly commercialize your open-source project? Today, there is a great deal of friction here. Link
CloudBees, the COSS company behind the MIT-licensed Jenkins engine, officially hits $100M+ ARR! Link
The Postman Open Philosophy. Link
Patrick O'Shaughnessy's conversation with Matt Mullenweg on: why the best companies build worlds, the pendulum of centralization and decentralization, challenges facing the internet, and being a connoisseur of things overlooked. Link
"The idiot CEO of SCO that tried to sue Linux out of existence just filed for bankruptcy" - Peter Wang (CEO and Co-Founder of Anaconda). Discussion follows. Link
JJ: I nominate Mike Volpi as the most successful COSS investor (perhaps also generally VC) of ALL time. He has helped produce the following $15B+ potential COSS co's over the last decade: Kong, Elastic, Confluent, Starburst Data, Cloudera, Strapi, and more. Link
Hiring Your First Open Source Community Manager. Link
Eliot Horowitz, founder of MongoDB, announces new journey into robotics with Viam. Link
Pierre Burgy (co-founder and CEO of Strapi) and Piotr Karwatka (co-founder and CTO of Vue Storefront) discuss open source, community building, business models, and more. Link
Mitchell Hashimoto and Tobias Schlottke discuss how to be successful in open source and business at the same time. Link
Explore TrueUp, a company data analytics platform, with a ranking of top open-source companies. Link
See the companies having their best month ever in contributor growth! (via Julia Schottenstein) Link
JJ: The best COSS companies implement many business models in parallel. While not COSS, SaaS company DataDog implements many business models in parallel also: Pricing per host (APM), Pricing per function (serverless), Pricing per million logs (log Mgmnt), Pricing per user (incident Mgmt). Link
💸 COSS Liquidity
Datadog acquires Sqreen, an application security platform, and Timber Technologies, the company behind Vector. 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 and OSS Capital (the first and only COSS-dedicated early-stage investor platform for COSS founders)
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