The rise of Open Source Startups: exploring the ROSS Index

The Q4 document of the fastest-growing open startups has recently been published. Now in its fourth year, the “Runa Open Source Startup Index,” better known as ROSS Index, publishes quarterly data tables collected from GitHub, revealing a significant number of rapidly developing startups.

At least the first 20 startups in the ROSS index are European, including one from Italy.

The ROSS Index is distinguished by its use of a clear and transparent evaluation criterion: the number of GitHub stars. This metric was chosen for its simplicity and ease of external verification.

The “stars” on GitHub allow for a fair comparison between different repositories, while providing an overview of the most influential and trending open source products. Although there is no perfect metric for evaluating open source software, stars represent an effective and direct indicator of a project’s popularity and impact.

The ROSS Index focuses on the relative growth of GitHub stars, rather than their absolute number. This approach shifts attention from established open source entities to new and promising startups.

Start / StartUp

Star growth is calculated for all repositories that start the target period with at least 1,000 stars. The Runa Capital investment team conducts a manual verification of these repositories, selecting only startups and publishing a list ordered by the percentage growth of stars.

A “startup,” for the purposes of the ROSS index, is defined as a commercial organization focused on the product that meets specific criteria:

- Founded less than ten years ago,

- Raised less than $100 million in total funding,

- Has a product closely related to its open source repositories, and has not been acquired or gone public before the end of the evaluation period.

This definition excludes side projects, initiatives without a clear commercial entity, or those developed by large technology companies.

Here is a list of the top twenty ROSS projects presented in the ROSS Q4 2023 report.

1. Bruno (usebruno/bruno, 10.4K stars, 899174% AGR). Fast and Git-Friendly Opensource API client, aimed at revolutionizing the status quo represented by Postman, Insomnia and similar tools out there. Founded in 2021 in Bangalore
2. Pythagora (pythagora-io/gpt-pilot, 18.8K stars, 29357% AGR). Dev tool that increases developer’s productivity 20x by offloading 95% of coding tasks from the developer to LLM. Founded in 2023 in Zagreb
3. Ollama (jmorganca/ollama, 28.9K stars, 19258% AGR). Get up and running with Llama 2 and other large language models locally. Founded in 2023 in Toronto
4. Mintplex Labs (mintplex-labs/anything-llm, 6.4K stars, 4984% AGR). ChatGPT built with your business in mind with full permission controls, customization and privacy. Founded in 2022 in Los Angeles
5. Wasp (wasp-lang/wasp, 8.8K stars, 1943% AGR). Wasp is a programming language for building full-stack web applications. Founded in 2020 in Zagreb. Raised $1.5M from 468 Capital, Abstraction Capital, Acequia Capital (AceCap), Chris Schagen, HV Capital, Lunar Ventures, Preetha Parthasarathy, Tokyo Black, Y Combinator
6. Arc53 (arc53/docsgpt, 13.6K stars, 1711% AGR). GPT-powered chat for documentation. Founded in 2019 in Edinburgh
7. Omnivore (omnivore-app/omnivore, 7.1K stars, 1095% AGR). Omnivore is a mobile application for people who like reading. Founded in 2022 in San Francisco
8. Twenty (twentyhq/twenty, 6.8K stars, 1000% AGR). The #1 open-source CRM. Founded in 2023 in San Francisco
9. Labring (labring/fastgpt, 7.9K stars, 652% AGR). AI knowledge base building platform based on LLM large model. Founded in 2022 in Hangzhou
10. Activepieces (activepieces/activepieces, 5.7K stars, 534% AGR). Activepieces is an open source business automation software that allows users to automate their work without writing code. Founded in 2022 in San Francisco. Raised $1.55M from Y Combinator
11. Roboflow (roboflow/supervision, 8.3K stars, 452% AGR). Roboflow is a developer tool for building computer vision models faster and more accurately. Founded in 2019 in Des Moines. Raised $22.24M from Aston Motes, Calvin French-Owen, Cassidy Williams, Craft Ventures, DJ Patil, Elizabeth Caven, Greg Brockman, Harry Hurst, Jack Altman, James Tamplin, Joe Morrissey, Kevin Liu, Lachy Groom, Leore Avidar, Max Altman, Mike Maples Jr, Next Level Ventures, Quiet Capital, Sam Altman, Y Combinator
12. LangGenius (langgenius/dify, 13.3K stars, 444% AGR). Easy-to-use LLMOps platform to build & manage AI-native apps. Founded in 2023 in New York
13. Danswer (danswer-ai/danswer, 5.8K stars, 374% AGR). Danswer allows you to ask natural language questions against internal documents and get back reliable answers backed by quotes and references from the source material. Founded in 2023 in San Francisco
14. Tracel AI (tracel-ai/burn, 5.4K stars, 362% AGR). Deep Learning framework, optimized for both training and inference, serving as the foundation for any intelligent system. Founded in 2023 in Quebec
15. Voxel51 (voxel51/fiftyone, 6.2K stars, 326% AGR). Dataset experimentation tooling that transforms the ways CV/ML scientists evaluate their data. Founded in 2016 in Ann Arbor. Raised $13.75M from Drive Capital, eLab Ventures, NIST, Shasta Ventures, Tech Startup Stabilization Fund, Top Harvest Capital
16. Tldraw (tldraw/tldraw, 29.4K stars, 275% AGR). Tldraw is a drawing app that provides users with a collaborative canvas without any login. Founded in 2021 in London. Raised $2.7M from Lux Capital and NP-Hard Ventures
17. Grist Labs (gristlabs/grist-core, 5.8K stars, 268% AGR). Grist Labs designs and develops reimagining software to manage data and allows users to create their own relational spreadsheet easily. Founded in 2014 in New York
18. Trigger.dev (triggerdotdev/trigger.dev, 6.3K stars, 263% AGR). Trigger.dev is a coding tool for automating complex workflows. Founded in 2022 in London. Raised $3M from Y Combinator, Wayfinder Ventures, Chris Golda, Liquid2, Rebel Fund, Pioneer Fund, Orange Collective, Paul Copplestone, Ant Wilson, Thomas Mann, Moataz Soliman, Arash Ferdowsi, Andrew Miklas
19. Snapshot Labs (snapshot-labs/snapshot, 5.3K stars, 257% AGR). Snapshot Labs is an off-chain gasless multi-governance tool for crypto projects to poll their user bases. Founded in 2021. Raised $4M from 1kx, Boost VC, Coinbase Ventures, Fire Eyes DAO, Gnosis, Kleros, LongHash Ventures, MetaCartel Ventures, Scalar Capital, StarkWare Industries, The LAO
20. Continue (continuedev/continue, 5.8K stars, 252% AGR). Continue is the open-source autopilot for software development — an IDE extension that brings the power of ChatGPT to VS Code and JetBrains. Founded in 2023 in San Francisco. Raised $2.1M from Heavybit, Julien Chaumond, Lisha Li, Florian Leibert

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