COSS Weekly, Issue #25: April 18th, 2021
Here's the twenty-fifth 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 Public Markets.
This second full week of April unveiled another FIVE new COSS funding announcements (Dendron, Meroxa, Wire, Gitcoin and Intrigue). $51M in total, so a bit of a lighter week fundraising-wise, but we also saw the largest (technically) COSS IPO ever ($COIN!). Big congrats to all the Coinbase investors and founders. Bitcoin is technically an MIT licensed open source project, and without it, Coinbase would fundamentally not exist.
💰 COSS Funding Announcements: $51M
- Dendron, creators of the open source PMK (personal knowledge management) note taking tool of the same name, announced their $2M seed led by FUSE (Seattle VC). Link
- Meroxa, creators of the open source driven data pipeline infra tool, announced their $15M Series A led by Drive (Midwestern US VC). Link
- Wire, creators of the open source collaboration suite featuring messenger, voice calls, video calls, conference calls, file-sharing, and external collaboration –all protected by a secure end-to-end-encryption, announced their $21M Series B led by UVC (Berlin VC). Link
- Gitcoin, focused on creating tools for open source creators to grow and get paid, announced their $11.3M Series A led by Paradigm (early crypto VC founded by Matt Huang of Sequoia and Fred Ehrsam of Coinbase). Link
- Intrigue, creators of the open source tool for discovering security attack-surface vulnerabilities, announced their $2M Seed led by LiveOak (Texas VC). Link
📚 COSS Content / Media:
- Microsoft announced their acquisition of Nuance for $20B~, signaling a lot of innovation on the horizon in the NLU/NLP space! Link
- Coqui, a new COSS startup behind the increasingly popular open source Text-To-Speech standard TTS has launched a model zoo. Link
- GitHub CTO Jason Warner opined on the drama around the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and their stance around Richard Stallman (re)joining their board recently. Link
- AWS has officially launched a broader fork of Elasticsearch called OpenSearch. Link
- The Information interviewed Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Proton, on how they are fighting big tech - they are the creators of the open source and encrypted mail system ProtonMail (currently boasting > 50M users and growing rapidly). Link
- Red Hat launched the v2.0 of their Open Source Way manual. Link
- MIT review wrote about how Nasa's next lunar rover will run and be powered by open source. Link
- Bruno Lowagie, founder of iText, wrote about the "dark magic" of startup valuations. Link
- JJ provided a live play-by-play of the high-powered discussion and interview between Ben Horowitz (co-founder of A16z), Ali Ghodsi (Databricks CEO) and Dave McJannet (HashiCorp CEO). Link
- Joe Duffy, founder of Pulumi, was interviewed on the new "OSS Startup" podcast. Link
- Astasia Myers of Redpoint and Imran Ghory of Blossom Capital joined the latest "Open Source in Business" series produced by Dave Neary at Red Hat. Link
- Trusted Insight interviewed JJ on their institutional LP network podcast. Link
- Grafana creator Torkel Ödegaard was interviewed on the Flagsmith podcast. Link
- Loris Cro wrote about "playing the open source game" and some COSS dynamics. Link
- Julz Friedman wrote about the weirdness of "big open source" with additional commentary on some COSS dynamics as well. Link
- JJ identified that Neuralink's networking stack is based on the open source ZeroMQ project, based on a great play-by-play video narrative thanks to Stanford Professor Paul Nuyujukian. Link
💸 COSS Liquidity:
- Tecton (COSS company behind the Uber Michelangelo ML system, funded by A16z and Sequoia) acquired the team behind the open source Feast project, a leading ML feature store. Link
📊 $COSS - Public Markets:
- Coinbase is being included in our public $COSS index. They have replaced $TLND (Talend) which was officially taken private last week by Thoma Bravo.
- The total value of all nine (9) public COSS companies is now $100B ~. 📈
- Last week, $COSS grew again by 3.1% (exactly). 📈
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