🧑💻 Developer-First #148 - Europe’s Open Source Startup Investors
The rise of open-source in Europe – and the 100 investors leading the charge
Hello friend,
Commercial Open Source Software is having a moment in Europe.
To help founders and investors navigate this growing ecosystem, our Avolta data team analysed 800+ funding rounds between 2015 and 2025 involving European investors and COSS startups.
The result? A curated database of 100 investors who have backed at least two open-source startups over the past 10 years.
Here are some key takeaways:
📊 Top 3 Most Active Investors
1. Index Ventures – 29 unique investments
2. Kima Ventures – 12
3. Seedcamp – 12
🇪🇺 Top 3 OSS-Investing Countries
1. United Kingdom – 122 investments
2. France – 59
3. Germany – 56
🏢 Top Corporate Backers?
Europe’s telco giants: Ericsson, Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom, and Swisscom.
The complete database is open-source and includes (when available) the names of the partners leading OSS deals.
👉 Want access? Just reply to this email.
P.S.: I’m doing a limited edition of my Unicorn CTO live training program starting the week of May 5th, and I have a few spots available. Click here to learn more about the program, or contact me directly if you’re interested.
Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.
💰 Market Summary - Week of April 7th, 2025
13 companies raised $557 million across 7 product categories in 5 countries.
Europe-based companies attracted 21.2% of the total funding vs 6.3% for Asia-based companies and 72.5% for North America-based companies.
Cloud is the category that attracted the highest funding.
3 companies provide or contribute to an open-source product.
3 companies were acquired this week.
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
🏢 Funding By Company
Tailscale, from Toronto 🇨🇦, raised $160 million in Series C funding led by Accel. Tailscale provides secure, private networks without weeks of setup and configuration, unlike traditional corporate VPNs. (more)
Rescale, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $115 million in Series D funding led by Applied Materials and NVIDIA. Rescale’s cloud platform accelerates product development and scientific discovery across industries, utilising compute, data, and AI solutions. (more)
incident.io, from London 🇬🇧, raised $62 million in Series B funding led by Insight Partners. incident.io is an all-in-one platform that simplifies incident management for engineering teams, integrating on-call scheduling, incident response, and status pages. (more)
Tessell, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $60 million in Series B funding led by WestBridge Capital. Tessell is on a mission to be the go-to DBaaS platform for startups and established enterprises by bringing together the benefits of cloud elasticity, utility economics, and enterprise-level governance and security. (more)
NexGen Cloud, from London 🇬🇧, raised $45 million in Series A funding from undisclosed investors. NexGen Cloud is a global leader in sustainable AI Cloud solutions, offering Data Sovereignty to its clients. (more)
LiveKit, from San Jose 🇺🇸, raised $45 million in Series B funding led by Altimeter Capital. LiveKit provides a platform to build and scale voice and video applications, known as The Realtime Cloud. (more)
groundcover, from Tel Aviv 🇮🇱, raised $35 million in Series B funding led by Zeev Ventures. groundcover is a cloud application monitoring solution that reinvents the domain with eBPF 🐝, built for modern production environments. (more)
Fern, from New York 🇺🇸, raised $9 million in Series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Fern provides a platform where users can input OpenAPI to output idiomatic SDKs and beautiful API docs, backed by YCombinator. (more)
pyannoteAI, from Paris 🇫🇷, raised $8.9 million in Seed funding led by Crane Venture Partners and Serena. Built on over a decade of CNRS research, pyannote AI offers state-of-the-art solutions for voice AI. (more)
HoneyHive, from New York 🇺🇸, raised $7.4 million in Seed funding led by Insight Partners. HoneyHive is the leading AI observability and evaluation platform, trusted by next-gen AI startups to Fortune 100 enterprises. (more)
Spektion, from Dripping Springs 🇺🇸, raised $5 million in Seed funding led by LiveOak Ventures. Spektion transforms how organisations meet the challenge of third-party software risk by combining cutting-edge technology with deep practitioner expertise. (more)
Springtail, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $2.5 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Gradient Ventures. Springtail is a scalable, real-time read replica for Postgres on AWS that allows users to scale up compute for heavy workloads and scale down during low usage to cut costs. (more)
Sagittal.ai, from London 🇬🇧, raised $2.2 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Twin Path Ventures. Sagittal’s product, Neo, dramatically speeds up your product development teams by automating the software development lifecycle. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
Zorus, from Tampa 🇺🇸, was acquired by DNSFilter. Zorus Filtering with CyberSightTM is a next-gen cybersecurity solution that combines device-based DNS filtering with robust behavioural insights, designed by industry veterans. (more)
Grit, from New York 🇺🇸, was acquired by Honeycomb. Grit puts software maintenance on autopilot with fully automated migrations and AI-assisted refactoring, thanks to its open-source query engine. (more)
Outerbase, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, was acquired by Cloudflare. Outerbase is the all-in-one collaborative window into your database, allowing users to easily edit, manage, and run queries on their data without ever writing a single line of code. (more)
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
microsoft / markitdown (✩ 6,311 stars this week) - Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown.
yeongpin / cursor-free-vip (✩ 5,472 stars this week) - Cursor Free VIP.
juliangarnier / anime (✩ 3,781 stars this week) - JavaScript animation engine.
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