A recent report highlights the top 20 open source startups globally, with over half of them focused on artificial intelligence (AI).

The report was compiled by Runa Capital, a European venture capital firm that has been operating the Runa Open Source Startup (ROSS) Index since 2020. The ROSS Index provides quarterly updates on the fastest-growing open source projects based on GitHub “stars,” a metric similar to a social media “like.” In 2023, Runa began publishing annual reports, showcasing the most popular commercial open source startups for the year.

Last year’s report indicated that AI and data infrastructure were driving demand for open source tools, with LangChain topping the ROSS Index for its open source framework for building large language model (LLM)-centric applications.

This year’s report tells a similar story, with AI being central to 11 of the top 20 companies.

It’s worth noting that the ROSS Index is highly curated and only includes open source projects closely linked to commercial companies, with specific criteria such as being less than 10 years old, having raised less than $100 million in funding, and being entirely independent.

Stargazing

The top spot on the 2024 ROSS Index is held by Ollama, a Y Combinator alum that has developed an open source tool for running LLMs like Meta’s Llama and DeepSeek locally. Ollama’s GitHub star count grew by 76,000 in 2024, increasing by 261% to over 105,000 stars.

Next on the list is Zed Industries, a cross-platform collaborative code editor designed for high-performance collaboration with humans and AI. Zed went open source in January 2024 and gained over 52,000 GitHub stars throughout the year.

In third place is LangGenius, the company behind the open source LLM app development platform Dify. The project gained over 43,000 new GitHub stars in 2024, growing by 326% to nearly 57,000 stars.

ComfyUI, an open source node-based program for generating images, videos, and audio using generative AI models, also made the top five. Its GitHub star count grew by 195% to 61,900 stars in 2024.

Rounding out the top five is All Hands, the company behind the open source platform OpenHands for building software development agents. OpenHands garnered 39,600 GitHub stars from its launch in March 2024 to the end of the year.

The ROSS Index for last year highlights the explosive growth in AI and LLMs, as well as the continued demand for developer tooling, with projects like Zed and Astral’s UV featuring in the top 10. Other notable projects include PDF manipulation tool Stirling PDF, finance management software Maybe Finance, and remote desktop software RustDesk.

Ethereum blockchain-focused Fuel also made the list, indicating that crypto and web3 are still active areas of development.

Open source software is inherently distributed, with contributors from around the world. However, commercial entities often have a central location, such as where they are incorporated.

The ROSS Index for last year shows that San Francisco is home to six of the top 20 ROSS startups, while Canada has three, and Europe, Singapore, and China make up the rest.

Methodology

There are alternative ways to track popular open source projects, such as the Open Source Index by Two Sigma Ventures, which showcases the top 100 projects without a specific focus on commercial startups.

GitHub also offers a list of trending projects, which does not focus specifically on commercial businesses.

The methodology behind the ROSS Index is based on GitHub “stars,” which can be an imperfect metric. Older projects naturally accumulate more “stars,” so Runa focuses on relative growth over a 90-day period for quarterly reports and absolute star counts for annual reports.

This means that the annual report may differ from quarterly reports, as absolute star counts do not always align with rapid growth patterns.

There may be issues with what is considered “open source,” as the ROSS Index does not strictly require a recognized copyleft or permissive open source license. Runa adheres to a “commercial perception” of open source rather than the official open source definition.

Despite these potential limitations, the ROSS Index provides a useful indicator of trending open source technologies and the companies building businesses around them.