COSS Weekly #129

Here's the one-hundred twenty-ninth issue of COSS Weekly, the global commercial open source (COSS) company category newsletter, brought to you every weekend by the team at OSS Capital, creators and stewards of COSS Community and Open Core Summit.

We deliver only the most fresh 😋 news from the previous week in COSS across: Funding, Content, Jobs, Liquidity and $COSS (Public Markets).

Last week saw $11.1M in funding announcements from OpenSats and NetBird, Databricks' acquisition of Okera and Mozilla's acquisition of Fakespot, exciting progress for Godot and OpenBB, LLM news, and more!

Enjoy!

💰 COSS Funding: $11.1M

• OpenSats, funding projects related to Bitcoin and nostr, announced their $10M donation from Jack Dorsey. Link
• NetBird, a P2P WireGuard-based overlay network, announced their €1.1M pre-seed led by Nauta Capital. Link

📚 COSS Content

• WordPress.com: "Starting May 1, you will no longer be able to share your https://t.co/eRvNKWaolr posts automatically to Twitter using Jetpack Social. This decision came after a number of conversations with Twitter since their change to the terms and pricing of the Twitter API.... https://t.co/OZgByAiUtH" Link

• Open Source Startup Podcast🎙: "Huge Open Source Startup Podcast Release💪 @amanda_robs & @tnachen interview @Replit Founder @amasad digging into Replit's roots in education, using AI to supercharge the developer experience, building a horizontal platform & much more✨ https://t.co/cFexdEf3yU" Link

• JJ: "Great open source alternative to Qualtrics ... https://t.co/vArfYopD59" Link

• JJ: "Who's building an open source alternative to @NVIDIA? Open source the chip designs ✅ Open source CUDA ✅ Open source the whole stack ✅ Monetize by building a vertically integrated cloud+hardware platform 💰" Link

• Matt Mullenweg: "Really excited for staging sites to launch! These plans also include plug-in auto-updates, best security, 2FA, high frequency CPUs, real-time backups, real-time multi-datacenter failover, and more... https://t.co/em8Ikp75wF" Link

• Amjad Masad ⠕: "Chris Lattner of LLVM and Swift fame just announced a new programming language for ML that is high-performance and backwards compatible with Python (works with Python libraries). Could be a game changer. https://t.co/QO6lAxN0ZN" Link

• TechCrunch: "Bluesky invites become a hot commodity as demand for the Twitter alternative outstrips access https://t.co/negPNOtG7T by @sarahintampa" Link

• JJ: "Today in fastest growing open source projects on @github ... It's language models and open source apps all the way down! @bluesky @calcom 👀 https://t.co/PCkHaFCbPC" Link

• Viam Robotics: "1.) 🚀 LAUNCH 🚀 Viam is officially launching GA today, empowering a new era of robotics and automation. Our platform is designed to make it easy for anyone to create, program, and operate robots. Let's revolutionize industries together! #viam #GAlaunch @eliothorowitz https://t.co/2xqUboGDYZ" Link

• Didier Lopes: "1121 new OpenBB Hub registered users. Looking forward to seeing this graph grow over time as our users find out that using the OpenBB Terminal with the OpenBB Hub improves A LOT the user experience. https://t.co/Hp9VB5EsM7" Link

• Didier Lopes: "OpenBB Bot fully free for individuals. Let's surpass the 2 Million commands that have been run on Discord 🚀 Let me know what type of data would you like accessible on the bot next. https://t.co/NqqpF1LzsO" Link

• Eliot: "Viam's GA Launch is today, but we have already been working with some incredible companies. The most exciting part of this launch is finally being able to share about these projects with you. Take a look at our current clients, and stay tuned for more... https://t.co/shk96EmSum" Link

• OpenBB 🦋: "Federal Reserve is set to announce its decision on interest rates today. Markets anticipate no change in rates amid ongoing economic recovery and inflation concerns. Use the #OpenBB SDK to follow the trend in fed rates and policy changes. https://t.co/bURgHIrAdH" Link

• W4 Games: "Maximizing open-source potential while minimizing risks is key for success. Check out our latest blog on how enterprise support can help and share your support needs with us: https://t.co/2rLh28maps #opensource #GodotEngine" Link

• Jamin Ball: "Some cool new AI features from GitLab today. They're in a great spot to integrate AI into DevSecOps workflows - auto generate test files for merge requests - code explanation - issue comment summaries value stream analysis - NLP interface to ask questions about Docs Exciting... https://t.co/ga4yJqimK6" Link

• JJ: "Wow... @godotengine is now outpacing @unity on @itchio volume. 🔥 https://t.co/2WSDFtkY6p" Link

• GDQuest: "Unity's laying off 600 more workers to set itself up for "greater growth." These layoffs seem to occur after being profitable in the first quarter. With last year's layoffs, they've let go of over 1000 people? Unity was losing money so this kind of stuff was bound to happen,... https://t.co/gBARVgBYYd" Link

• Philipp Schmid: "Introducing StarCoder ⭐️ a 15B open-source Code-LLM created by @huggingface and @ServiceNow through @BigCodeProject 🔡 8192 token context window 📊 trained on 1 trillion token 💭 80+ Programming languages 🔐 only permissive licensed data ✅ commercial use https://t.co/gEgKeUL1vN" Link

• Smoke-away: "Tfw open source will win: https://t.co/fzN4S2aZCt" Link

• JJ: "Wow. This is an incredible level of transparency. @Odoo founder and CEO @fpodoo just shared his extremely capital efficient path to $300M+ in revenue on just $10M~ raised since inception. https://t.co/ZfWy7D2oqQ" Link

• WordPress.com: "Read this. Then, read it again. The impact of WordPress is the most important thing to all of us in this community, and it always will be. https://t.co/vJY514pUSp" Link

• Jim Fan: "Today is the Llama moment for coding! 💫 StarCoder-15B reaches 40.8% on HumanEval benchmark, beating the 30x bigger PaLM. Coding holds a very special place in NLP. Most software in the world has AI-friendly APIs. LLMs good at coding will master the digital tools, greatly... https://t.co/zKCyz4m2sN https://t.co/d2NT4brOpT" Link

• Emad: "We are moving to fully open on language model development over the coming weeks @StabilityAI It's all a bit of a black box so we will move to more continuous releases & open discussion about various things we are trying as we go to full releases. Also share the mistakes. Oops." Link

• Didier Lopes: "https://t.co/fr1A8lgyu2" Link

• TechCrunch: "Hear how MinIO built a unicorn in object storage on top of Kubernetes and open source https://t.co/FTPkZOhx3d by @ron_miller" Link

• TechCrunch: "What is Bluesky? Everything to know about the app trying to replace Twitter https://t.co/QMT8HucOJo" Link

• JJ: "Incredible... @DrawThingsapp unlocks the full power of @StableDiffusion in your pocket. Runs SD locally and generates images without any API calls. 🤯🤯🤯 https://t.co/o7U2No35ev" Link

• DeSci Labs: "NASA scientist and program officer Megan Ansdell uses DeSci Nodes to make her astrophysics publication fully reproducible and accessible. https://t.co/6vvl71iMOY https://t.co/0ulduFijnz" Link

• Andrej Karpathy: "Oops haven't tweeted too much recently; I'm mostly watching with interest the open source LLM ecosystem experiencing early signs of a cambrian explosion. Roughly speaking the story as of now: 1. Pretraining LLM base models remains very expensive. Think: supercomputer + months.... https://t.co/kotAkey2sQ" Link

• Romeen Sheth: "How did you build a business that generates $250M/yr in profit on 0 capital raised in ~10 years? I asked @Nithin0dha this question last week. Nithin founded Zerodha - a once in a generation Indian fintech company. The success ties back to 8 factors. Here they are:" Link

• MosaicML: "📢 Introducing MPT: a new family of open-source commercially usable LLMs from @MosaicML. Trained on 1T tokens of text+code, MPT models match and - in many ways - surpass LLaMa-7B. This release includes 4 models: MPT-Base, Instruct, Chat, & StoryWriter (🧵) https://t.co/Zg7PcrQvOi https://t.co/BVyGZ1T9Vn" Link

• Unusual Ventures: "What do investors want to see in pitch decks for #opensource companies? What are the best metrics to demonstrate adoption? Unusual Ventures Partner (and StackRox Co-founder) @weiliendang has a new resource for #OSS fundraising success. https://t.co/Uq6BZ7ej0q" Link

• • * * \ *💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)**

• JJ: "Congrats to @confluentinc (the @apachekafka company) on adding $1B in market cap today. https://t.co/ukJCzam59R" Link

• Matei Zaharia: "Excited to welcome @okerainc to Databricks to simplify governance across data and AI! We'll be using Okera technology in #UnityCatalog to make it easier to help customers improve security, privacy and data quality for their data and AI projects. https://t.co/LURE1Vdlsl" Link

• Jamin Ball: "Confluent quarter: - $174M rev (+38% YoY) vs $167M consensus (4% beat) - $182M next Q guidance vs $181M consensus (1% raise) - Kept full year guide constant - $74M Confluent Cloud rev (+89% YoY) - ~$640M ARR (+41%) - >130% DBNR - 67% GM - (48%) FCF Margin $CFLT" Link

• TechCrunch: "Mozilla buys Fakespot, a startup that identifies fake reviews, to bring shopping tools to Firefox https://t.co/89c6BEtWBe by @aiishamalik1" Link

🛠️ COSS Jobs

• 3,410 jobs and 274 companies hiring! Link
• COSS Community 🌏: "🤩 https://t.co/mJkKPs78ia" [Link](https://twitter.com/undefined/status/1654874712068202496)

📊 $COSS - Public Markets

• $COSS markets down 0.54% last week
• Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of market close last Friday courtesy of Koyfin.