COSS Weekly Issue #24

COSS Weekly, Issue #24: April 11th, 2021

Here's the twenty-fourth issue of COSS Weekly, the global commercial open source (COSS) company ecosystem newsletter, brought to you every week by the team at OSS Capital, creators and maintainers of COSS Community and Open Core Summit.

Each week, we aggregate the latest major weekly news in COSS, including commentary across Funding, Content, Liquidity, Data and Markets.

As promised, the first week of April kicked off to a roaring start with SIX new funding announcements (Redis, Streamlit, Snorkel AI, InfuseAI, Gitpod and Pica8).

Additionally, 2021 to-date (Q1~) COSS funding announcements, as of last week, have now officially surpassed ALL of 2020: $3.1 BILLION 🔥 ... At this pace, > $10B+ will be raised by COSS companies in 2021, surpassing the last 20 years combined. 🤯

Perhaps the most significant and important news from last week was the extraordinarily relieving news that SCOTUS overturned Oracle's copyright claim against Google's use of a few thousands lines of Java, marking an industry-critical turning point ensuring the future success of open source, API interoperability and so much more for software rights freedoms and innovation!! 👏👏👏

💰 COSS Funding Announcements: $217.3M 

• Redis Labs, the COSS company behind the Redis database, has raised an additional $110M in Series G funding led by Tiger Global with participation from Softbank Vision Fund 2.. DOUBLING the $1B valuation to $2B in 9 months. Link

• Snorkel AI, the COSS Snorkel company (a system for quickly generating training data with weak supervision ML methods) has raised Series B funding of $35M led by Lightspeed . Link

• Streamlit, the company building "next-gen Jupyter Notebook" Python data apps, has also raised a $35M Series B (ha!) led by Sequoia. Link

• Pica8, an SDN company commercializing the OpenFlow protocol, raised $20M+ in additional funding let by WI Harper Group and Aspiro Capital (Chinese firms). Link

• Gitpod, ready-to-made developer environments, raised a $13M Series A led by General Catalyst. Link

• InfuseAI, bringing Kubernetes-powered ML to all, raised a $4.3M Series A led by Wistron. Link
   

📚 COSS Content / Media:

• SOCUTS overturns the Oracle vs. Google case. HUGE WIN FOR OPEN SOURCE! Link  
• Martin Casado and crew at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, have released the recording of their last Infra Clubhouse podcast. Link  
• Eleuther AI (truly open source Open AI in Europe) has released a major GPT-3 dataset (German). Link  
• Bruno Lowagie, creator and founder of iText, shares some of his COSS business model evolution learnings. Link  
• HD Moore, founder of Rumble, discusses Product-Led-Growth with Decibel. Link  
• Excellent twitterstorm analysis (from March) on $QTCOM, the Qt company. Link  
• JJ noticed that Databricks has invested heavily in marketing growth off the heels of their $1B Series G in January. Link  
• Typesense (Elastic competitor) CEO interview. Link  
• JJ thinks Roblox has more developers than GitHub. Link  
• Madrona, Seattle VC firm, interviews Jeremiah Lowin, CEO of Prefect. Link  
• Admirable partnership between two great COSS companies: Confluent and Elastic. Link  
• Commentary on the OvG outcome by Cloudbees co-founder/CEO. Link  
• More than a decade from its creation in the UC Berkeley AMP Lab (the same lab that spawned Apache Spark), the academic predecessor to Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, has finally been transitioned to end-of-life status in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) attic 😱. Link  
• Google open-sourced a new voice encoding framework called Lyra. Link  
• MindsDB wrote about their fund-raising experience. Link  
• Wix (proprietary website-builder SaaS) ran a smear campaign against Wordpress. the post popular open source blogging CMS platform on the internet. Matt Mullenweg (Automattic and Wordpress founder) responded. Link  
• New Mark Shuttleworth Interview. Link  

💸 COSS Liquidity:

• Coinbase (technically a COSS company given that they would not exist without Bitcoin) released their truly mind-blowing Q1 financials ahead of their planned IPO trading day this next week. Link

📊 $COSS - Public Markets:

• The total value of all nine (9) public COSS companies is now $55.8B. 📈  
• Last week, $COSS grew by 3.1%. 📈