The new report introduces 20 top trends open source startups around the world.
This report is handicrafted by Runa Capital, a European venture capital firm that has been operating the Runa Open Source Startup (Ross) index since 2020. This index provides quarterly updates of the fastest growing projects in terms of Github’s “stars” perspective. Starting in 2023, Runa began writing its annual report, highlighting the most popular commercial open source startups for a particular year.
Last year’s report showed that AI and data infrastructure are driving demand for open source tools. LANGCHAIN attacked pole positions with loss indexes for an open source framework for building LLM-centric apps.
This year, the same story is at the heart of the top 20 companies.
It is worth noting that the Ross index is strictly curated and does not include old open source projects. Qualification projects must be closely linked to commercial companies (i.e. vendor-driven projects). That means there are no side projects. Additionally, these companies must be under the age of 10. Funding less than $100 million. And because it is completely independent, it is not listed in a subsidiary or publicly.
Starry sky
Top spot at the 2024 Loss Index is Ollama, a Y-combinator alum who has built open source tools to run open source tools (i.e. desktops) for running LLMs such as Meta’s Llama and Deepseek. Ollama’s Github Star count increased by about 76,000 from 2024 to 2024, increasing by 261% to over 105,000 (he rose to over 135,000 stars in the past few months).
Next on the list is Zed Industries, a “cross-platform collaboration code editor designed for high-performance collaboration between humans and AI.” The ZED project has been around for a while, but it only became open source in January 2024, but it has gained over 52,000 Github stars throughout the rest of the year.
Third place is Langgenius, the company behind the open source LLM app development platform called Dify. The project achieved more than 43,000 new Github stars last year, with 326% growing from around 13,000 to nearly 57,000. This has since surged to over 84,000 stars.
And then there’s Comfyui, an open source node-based program for generating images, videos and audio using generated AI models. The project’s Github star count rose 195% last year to 61,900 stars.
Finishing the top five is All Hands, the company behind an open source platform called OpenHands for building software development agents. OpenHands received 39,600 Github stars from its launch from March last year until the end of 2024, then added another 12,000 stars to the mix.
Last year’s Loss Index shows explosive growth in AI and LLMS, but it shows that developer tools, such as ZED and Astral’s UV (No. 9), are still hot in the open source world. Self-hostable tools focused on privacy are still in high demand.
Ethereum blockchain-centric fuel (No. 12) shows that Crypto/Web3 is alive and kicking.
Open source software has always been distributed, given the involvement of contributors from every corner of the glove. This is often the case for vendor-driven projects as well. However, commercial entities usually have a center of gravity, even if they mean a formally embedded location.
Last year’s Ross Index shows that San Francisco has six of Loss’ top 20 startups, three in Canada, and three in Europe (UK, Switzerland, Hungary and the Czech Republic), Singapore and China, making up the rest.
Methodology
There are other ways to track “hot” open source projects. Two Sigma Ventures operate open source indexes. This is similar in concept to the Ross index (also provides various ways to filter data), except that it introduces the top 100 projects without a specific focus on commercial startups.
GitHub itself also offers a list of top trending projects without a specific focus on commercial businesses.
It is also worth looking at the methodology behind the Loss Index. GitHub’s “stars” can be an incomplete metric, as they simply indicate that someone “likes” the project, rather than actively using or monitoring it. As older projects naturally source more “stars,” Runa focuses on the relative growth of the repository over the 90 days of its quarterly report, as well as the absolute number of new stars acquired in its annual report.
This also means that annual reports appear to be quite different to quarterly reports given that absolute star counts do not always match fast relative growth patterns.
There may also be some issues with what is classified as “open source.” Many of the projects on the list are actually released under a recognized copyleft or generous open source license, but this is not a strict rule for Loss Index. Runa says it follows the “commercial perception” of open source, rather than the official definition of open source. So, despite the fact that open source initiatives have not rubber stamped SSPL as “open source”, companies that have released software under a server-side public license (SSPL), for example, are still eligible for open source.
Still, this index is a useful indicator of not only what open source technologies are trending, but also how companies are trying to build their business on top of them.
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