The 20 hottest open source startups of 2024

A new report displays 20 open source starters from above to the world, more than half of which are closely aligned with artificial intelligence.

This report is the manual work of the European investment Capital, Runa Capital, which runs the Runa Open Source startup (Ross). Starting in 2023, Runa began to produce annual reports, with highlighting startups with the most popular open source in a specific year.

Last year’s report showed that the data and data infrastructure was leading the demand for open source tools, with the position of Langchain in the pole position in the Russian index for its open -source frame for building LLM applications.

It is a similar story this year, with Amnesty International Central to 11 of the 20 best companies.

It should be noted that the Russian index has been greatly coordinated and does not include any open source project. The qualified projects must be closely related to a commercial company (i.e. a project led by the seller), and this means that there are no side projects. In addition, the age of these companies should be less than 10 years; It raised less than $ 100 million in financing; Be completely independent – so it is not a subsidiary or publicly listed.

Stars

In the first place in the Ross 2024 index, it is OLLAMA, which is the YN Combinator Shab that is designed an open source tool to run LLMS such as Meta’s Llama and Deepseek locally (i.e. desktop). The number of GitHub stars from OLLAMA increased by 76,000 until 2024, as it increased by 261 % to more than 105,000 (since then increased to more than 135,000 stars over the past few months).

Next in the menu is Zed Industries, the cooperative programming instructor editor “designed for high performance cooperation with humans and AI.” The ZED project was present for a period of time, but it was not opened open until January 2024, and during the rest of the year, he gained more than 52,000 Jaithb.

In third place is Langgenius, the company behind the open source LLM application development platform called VIDY. The project achieved more than 43,000 stars, the new Githpet last year, increasing 326 % from about 13,000 to approximately 57,000 – a number that has since increased to more than 84,000 stars.

Then there is Comfyui, which is an open source knots program to create images, videos and sounds using artificial intelligence models. Count Github Star in the project was 195 % to 61,900 stars last year.

The approximation of the first five is all hands, the company is behind an open source platform called OpenHands to build software development agents. OpenHands has received 39,600 stars GitHub from its launch last March until the end of 2024 and from then has added 12,000 stars to this mix.

While the Russian Index for the past year shows explosive growth in AI and LLMS, it also shows how developer tools are still hot in the open source world, with the likes of Zed and Astral UV rays (No. 9) in the first ten. Privacy -focused tools suggest high demand.

Ethereum Blockchain, which focuses on fuel (No. 12), explains that the web3 survival and kick.

Open source programs have always been distributed by their nature, given that shareholders of all corners of the world can participate. This is often the case for the projects led by sellers as well; However, commercial entities usually have the center of gravity – even if it only means where it was formally combined.

The Russian index for last year shows that San Francisco is the home of six of the best 20 emerging Russian companies, while Canada has three, Europe (UK, Switzerland, Hungary, the Czech Republic), Singapore and China that make up the rest.

methodology

There are other ways to track “hot” source projects. TWO Sigma Ventures runs the open source index, which is similar to the concept of the Ross index except that it displays the best 100 projects without a specific focus on commercial startups (it also provides different ways to filter data).

GitHub provides itself with a two -way project list, again without focusing on commercial companies.

It is also worth looking at the methodology behind the Russian index. Github “Stars” can be an incomplete scale, because it only shows that someone “love” the project, rather than using it actively or monitoring it. It is natural that old projects have bought more “stars”, and for this reason Rana focused on the relative growth of warehouses over 90 days for their quarterly reports, and the absolute number of new stars acquired during the year for their annual report.

This also means that the annual report can seem completely different from the quarterly reports, given that the number of absolute stars will not always be in line with rapid relative growth patterns.

There may also be some problems about what has been classified as “an open source”. Although many projects in the menu have already been released under a Lopleft license or the recognized open source, this is not a strict condition for the Ross index. Rona says she is committed to “commercial perception” of the open source, instead of defining the official open source. As such, the company, which has issued its programs under the Server Side Public (SSPL) license, for example, will remain qualified as an open source, although the open source initiative did not explode SSPL as “open source”.

However, the indicator is a useful indicator not only for the types of open source technology that is heading, but also what companies are trying to build companies over them.