This week international venture capital firm Runa Capital released the latest annual Runa Open-Source Startup (ROSS) Index, a regularly updated ranking of the top-trending open-source startups. 

The annual report ranks 50 top-trending open-source startups by the annualised growth rate of GitHub stars at their repositories. 

The firm is a serial early-stage investor in deep tech startups across AI, ML and open source. It first released its Runa Open-Source Startup (ROSS) Index in 2020. 

The ROSS Index reliably predicts global funding for top-trending open-source companies.

More than half of all startups that emerged as top performers are AI and data infrastructure-focused, showcasing the increasing reliance on these technologies in the open-source community.

Beyond AI and Cloud, developer-centric startups have received significant attention. These innovators offer cutting-edge tools and solutions designed to elevate the developer experience and simplify the complexities of web development. This surge underlines a pivotal shift towards more sophisticated, user-friendly technologies that set new standards for what’s possible in tech.

The variety in programming languages among ROSS participants reflects an evolving tech landscape. Last year, out of nine GitHub repositories using Python, seven were AI-related. Python and Rust also saw a notable increase in usage, signalling their growing appeal and practicality for developers seeking reliable and efficient coding solutions.

Further, European startups are rapidly gaining ground, with 23 on the list, closely trailing the 26 US companies. This highlights a vibrant and growing open-source ecosystem across the continent.

According to Konstantin Vinogradov, General Partner at Runa Capital: 

“Open source startups often prefer to set up their key entity where most of their future customers and investors are located. 

This makes incorporating in the US the standard choice in the West, due to its speed, low cost, English language, broad set of tools, such as stock options and SAFEs, and large addressable market. I

n Europe, only the UK offers a moderately close alternative for global-focused companies, while most EU countries are pretty far from it.”

 The companies featured across all ROSS Indexes have raised a combined total of $2.7 billion.

The Top 20 Companies include:

• Sismo (France)issues ZK badges for reputation aggregation and privacy-preserving access control.
• Massa (France) is working on a cryptocurrency ecosystem designed for mass adoption and using Blockclique architecture to withstand thousands of transactions per second while staying secure and fully decentralised.
• Qdrant (Germany) is a vector similarity search engine and vector database. It deploys as an API service providing search for the nearest high-dimensional vectors. Embeddings or neural network encoders can be turned into full-fledged applications for matching, searching, and recommending.
• Formbricks (Germany) is an open-source micro-survey solution. It enables users to gather feedback during the customer journey. 
• Wasp (Croatia) is an open source, declarative domain-specific language (DSL) for developers who want to use the modern web dev stack (React, Node.js, Prisma ) without writing boilerplate.
• Shuttle (UK) is an open source cloud platform for developing and deploying apps with zero infra hassle. It replaces container technology with something more lightweight and simple, resulting in the fastest deploy times ever — talking tens of minutes down to milliseconds. 
• Hanko (Germany)builds open source customisable web components that are pre-built for all authentication use cases and can be placed freely in every web app.
• Nango (France) is a single API for all your integrations. Users can fully control and build deep integrations, on a single platform,which is Open-source, code-first and supports 100+ APIs out of the box.
• Manticore research (UK) has developed an easy-to-use, open source, fast database for search. 

 Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUK shared; 

“Runa is rapidly becoming one of the most trusted and knowledgeable sources of data analysis on open source software. The Runa index brings insightful updates. Unsurprisingly, of the top 50 open source based companies five are in the UK, over half —26  are in the US.

These organisations of course rely on contributions from the global open source ecosystem, and in particular the UK where our community plays a prominent role both in project contribution, and also as employees of many of these US companies, as was very evident at last week’s KubeCon.

The deep and diverse UK based open source talent pool is at the cutting edge of global tech and there to be leveraged by more UK organisations, as our tech companies become more competitive.”