COSS Weekly, Issue #18: February 28th, 2021
Welcome to the eighteenth 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
Plume, a smart home service provider, closes $270M Series E at $1.35B valuation led by Insight Partners. Link
Platform9, the leading SaaS Managed Kubernetes provider, announces $12.5M Series D-expansion to a total Series D round of $37.5M led by WRVI Capital. Link
KatanaGraph, a high-performance scale-out graph processing/AI/analytics company, announces $28.5M Series A led by Intel Capital. Link
Replit, makers of a multiplayer computing environment to learn how to code, build, and share apps with other people, announces $20M Series A led by A.Capital. Link
📚 COSS Content
Miguel Amigot (ibl.ai, Tesla, NVIDIA): Sunday conversation on Clubhouse about engineering open source communities. Another win from COSS.community. Link
Alexander Gallego (Founder and CEO of Vectorized): I'm looking for someone to hack on Wasmer core and Vectorized redpanda core. AFAIK bringing wasm to the largest streaming use cases. Link
5 Tricks to Bootstrap Your Open-Source Community by Moritz Plassnig. Link
FOSS inside India's tech unicorns by Rushabh Mehta. Link
The Entrepreneurial Coder Podcast with Kyle Matthews (Founder and CEO of Gatsby). Link
Explaining open source: the future business model? by Alex Baldwin. Link
Google launches Voice AI Accelerator, with initial cohort of 12 startups. Link
Waitlist is open for PlanetScale beta. Link
Jim Bisenius: In my past ~6-10 months fundraising, we've pitched a LOT of VCs & Angels. Want a secret?? Only one has ever signed up for our product and tried it out (JJ). Moral of the story? VCs don't care about your product (at first), they care about the money it could make them!. Link
10 Years of Open-Source Visualization by Mike Bostock (Founder of Observable, Creator of D3.js). Link
18 ways to differentiate open source products from upstream suppliers by Scott McCarty (RedHat). Link
Athens Research, the open-source and local-first alternative to Roam Research, is now publicly available. Link
Software at Scale 10 - David Cramer: CTO, Sentry. Link
The Cloudcast: Evolution of Commercial OSS with Joseph Jacks. Link
Why we trademark Open Source software and you should too by Sam Tuke (Lightmeter). Link
Band of AI startups launch 'rebel alliance' for interoperability. Link
JJ: OSS emphasized as one of the key Digital Ocean principles in the IPO S-1. (More details in thread). Link
Focus on Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires — HashiCorp Chief of Staff Shares His Playbook. Link
The Changelog: Community perspectives on Elastic vs AWS Link
JJ: COSS Builders weekly is happening on TwitterSpaces! Sunday, Feb 28th at 1pm PT! I'll be initiating the "space" from here. Looking forward to discussing an exciting week of $370M+ in funding announcements and conversations with new guests. Link
Sysdig contributes Falco's kernel module, eBPF probe, and libraries to the CNCF. Link
DataStax's Astra serverless computing platform hits general availability. Link
Reflecting on 10 Years of Lightbend ... and Looking to the Future by Jonas Bonér. Link
Balaji S. Srinivasan: Crypto APIs > corporate APIs, for the same reason you'd always pick open source over a *comparable* proprietary equivalent. Nothing against that proprietary equivalent, sometimes it must exist, but eventually a free & open version will be built. Crypto extends the scope of that. Link
The Future of InfluxDB OSS: More Open, Permissive with Complementary Closed Source by Paul Dix. Link
Shay Banon (CEO of Elastic): I took a loan for Elasticsearch trademark during the 2 years I quit my job to build it, believing in it. Amazon abused it since 2015, hurting users with confusion and worse experience. Part of ElasticLicense v2 goal is to help address trademark abuse. Link
Rafael Winterhalter: I have closed my GitHub sponsors account. (Thread details GitHub's stance on VAT and the challenges this creates for sponsorship recipients.) Link
RIP to the Flynn PaaS project and COSS company. Link
💸 COSS Liquidity
Bootlin acquired by two of its employees, Thomas Petazzoni and Alexandre Belloni. 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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