🧑💻 Developer-First #144 - 2025 French Tech COSS Companies
Mapping France’s Commercial Open Source Software Companies 🇫🇷🐧💰
Hello friend,
After publishing my first French Open Source Software Landscape in 2024, I realised I had missed several key players. So, for 2025, I teamed up with Avolta’s data team to completely revamp the map, ensuring we identified all commercial open source software companies founded in France (or by French founders).
This updated version now includes:
✅ 135 companies, with 84% headquartered in France, employing nearly 10,000 people.
✅ Over €3 billion in total funding, with 55% of these companies having raised at least one funding round.
🔎 What’s included?
This landscape focuses exclusively on commercial software vendors, regardless of their size, age, or whether they also offer services alongside their products.
Like last year, I’ve taken a pragmatic approach to defining “open source”—including:
Open core companies;
Companies contributing significantly to open source projects and monetising services around them;
Open-weight AI players like Mistral AI.
📖 Want access to the full database?
The data is open-source! Just reply to this email, and I’ll share it with you.
Looking forward to your feedback and seeing this landscape evolve! 🚀🔎
P.S.: I also released the 2024 Global Developer-First Transactions Report. If you missed it, click here to access the report.
P.P.S.: if you're a CTO or tech leader, consider joining the free Unicorn CTO Slack community. We're a small group of international CTOs and tech leaders, and we often meet for virtual (or not) coffees.
Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.
💰 Market Summary - Week of March 10th, 2025
8 companies raised $116,5 million across 7 product categories in 3 countries.
Europe-based companies attracted 6.9% of the total funding vs 27% for Asia-based companies and 66.1% for North America-based companies.
AI is the category that attracted the highest funding.
1 company provides or contributes to an open-source product.
0 company was acquired this week.
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
🏢 Funding By Company
Cartesia from San Francisco 🇺🇸 raised $64 million in a Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. Cartesia is on a mission to build the next generation of AI, providing ubiquitous, interactive intelligence that operates seamlessly wherever users are. (more)
Sola Security based in Tel Aviv 🇮🇱 secured $30 million in Seed funding led by S Capital and former long-time Sequoia VC Mike Moritz. Sola Security democratises cybersecurity, allowing organisations of all sizes to build and customise security tools with minimal resource investment through its AI-powered SaaS platform. (more)
pgEdge from Alexandria 🇺🇸 raised an undisclosed, strategic, amount from Akamai and Qube Research & Technologies. pgEdge offers distributed PostgreSQL services optimized for the network edge, combining multi-active, multi-region, and multi-cloud capabilities in a fully managed service. (more)
Onyx from San Francisco 🇺🇸 raised $10 million in a Seed round led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital. Onyx provides an open-source question-answering system that integrates private sources such as Slack, GitHub, and Confluence to answer queries in natural language. (more)
Nunu.ai in Zurich 🇨🇭 raised $6 million in a Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Nunu.ai is advancing AI in gaming with multi-modal AI agents designed for testing and playing any game. (more)
Hawcx in Los Altos 🇺🇸 secured $3 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Engineering Capital. Hawcx is redefining digital identity security with its passwordless authentication system, combining familiar login methods with the security of zero-trust passkey-based authentication. (more)
Cloud Gateway from London 🇬🇧 raised $2 million in Seed funding. Cloud Gateway provides networking and security services for both the public and private sectors in the UK, utilising the nation’s first SASE platform to enhance digital service innovation. (more)
JigsawStack from Singapore 🇸🇬 raised $1.5 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Ada Ventures. JigsawStack offers developers meticulously crafted APIs that dramatically speed up product development, promising up to tenfold faster shipping times. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
No transactions last week.
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
browser-use / browser-use (✩ 7,451 stars this week) - Make websites accessible for AI agents.
punkpeye / awesome-mcp-servers (✩ 4,47 stars this week) - A collection of MCP servers.
clockworklabs / SpacetimeDB (✩ 3,765 stars this week) - Multiplayer at the speed of light.
👍 Trending Developer-First Products on ProductHunt
Zencoder (👍 739) - Zencoder – AI coding assistant helping developers ship products faster. With deep contextual awareness, AI agents, and 20+ integrations, we help developers effortlessly build production ready solutions, right inside VS Code and JetBrains.
Qodo Gen (👍 586) - Qodo Gen, part of Qodo's code integrity platform, embeds AI agents into IDEs to improve coding, testing, and quality workflows. With deep context awareness, agents help devs solve complex coding and write cleaner, more efficient code with less manual effort.
Sherloq (👍 508) - Sherloq is a Collaborative SQL Repository. Using the AI-powered plugin, SQL users automatically save, organize, share, and document queries on-the-fly, without leaving the editor. Companies use Sherloq as the single source of truth for all their queries.
Thanks for sharing!