🧑💻 Developer-First #149 - Europe’s Open Source Unicorns: The $1B+ COSS Club
From JetBrains to Mistral AI, here are 16 European open source champions you should know
Hello friend,
This week, we’re shining a spotlight on Europe's Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) unicorns — and yes, there are more than you might think.
👇 Here are the 16 European COSS companies valued at over $1B: 🇺🇸 🇳🇱 Elastic – $7.5B (public), 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 Snyk – $7.4B, 🇨🇿 JetBrains – $7B (bootstrapped 🤯), 🇫🇷 Mistral AI – $6.4B, 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 GitLab – $5.9B (public), 🇧🇪 Odoo – $5.5B, 🇨🇭 Sonar – $4.7B, 🇫🇮 Aiven – $3B, 🇩🇪 SUSE – $2.6B (exit), 🇺🇸 🇫🇷 Talend – $2.4B (exit), 🇺🇸 🇳🇴 ForgeRock – $2.3B (exit), 🇺🇸 🇸🇪 Neo4j – $2.2B, 🇬🇧 Canonical – $1.3B, 🇺🇸 🇸🇪 MySQL – $1.1B (exit), 🇺🇸 🇨🇭 CloudBees – $1B, 🇬🇧 Stability AI – $1B
Key takeaways for founders and investors:
🔁 Half have exited: Two are publicly listed, four were acquired — often by private equity firms like Thoma Bravo.
🇺🇸 US remains the scale-up hub: 8 companies have moved their HQ to the US. Europe is often where innovation starts, but the US is where it scales.
🚀 Bootstrapping is still viable: JetBrains is the only bootstrapped unicorn, and it’s one of the largest. A powerful reminder that open source doesn’t always require VC money to succeed.
Leading segments:
• DevTools & Infra: JetBrains, GitLab, CloudBees
• Data & AI: Mistral AI, Neo4j, Elastic, Stability AI
• Security: Snyk, Sonar, ForgeRock
If you’re working on an open-source project today, these companies prove you can build a global, sustainable business starting from a public repo.
👉 Want access to the complete list? Just reply to this email.
Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.
💰 Market Summary - Week of April 14th, 2025
14 companies raised $234.7 million across 7 product categories in 6 countries.
Europe-based companies attracted 6.9% of the total funding vs 6.3% for Asia-based companies and 86.8% for North America-based companies.
Data Management is the category that attracted the highest funding.
2 companies provide or contribute to an open-source product.
2 companies were acquired this week.
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
🏢 Funding By Company
Hammerspace, from San Mateo 🇺🇸, raised $100 million in Series B funding led by Altimeter Capital. Hammerspace is radically changing how unstructured data is used and preserved, offering a Global Data Platform that unifies unstructured data across edge, data centres, and clouds, providing extreme parallel performance for AI, GPUs, and high-speed data analytics. (more)
Goodfire, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $50 million in Series A funding led by Menlo Ventures. Goodfire is building critical infrastructure that empowers developers to understand, edit, and debug AI models at scale, ensuring the creation of safer and more reliable systems. (more)
Scout AI, from Sunnyvale 🇺🇸, raised $15 million in Seed funding led by Align Ventures. Scout AI is a defence technology company building the AI brain for defence robotics, transforming uncrewed platforms into intelligent, mission-adaptive agents. (more)
RLWRLD, from Seoul 🇰🇷, raised $14.8 million in Seed funding led by Hashed. RLWRLD is building foundation models that give robots the ability to see, think, and use their hands like humans, unlocking real-world autonomy at scale. (more)
Deck, from Montreal 🇨🇦, raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Infinity Ventures. Deck is developing infrastructure to access user-permissioned data simply and at scale, often described as ‘Plaid-ifying’ any website using AI. (more)
NetRise, from Austin 🇺🇸, raised $10 million in Series A funding led by DNX Ventures. NetRise provides a next-generation product security platform for XIoT devices, offering in-depth binary analysis and vulnerability management. (more)
Bauplan, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $7.5 million in Seed funding led by Innovation Endeavors. Bauplan is a programmable data lake that allows users to load, transform, query, and manage data directly from their code. (more)
Portia AI, from London 🇬🇧, raised $5.8 million in Seed funding led by General Catalyst. Portia AI is developing a framework for creating simple, reliable, and authenticated AI agents suited for real-world production environments. (more)
TheStage AI, from Zug 🇨🇭, raised $4.5 million in Seed funding led by Mehreen Malik. TheStage AI is reshaping industries by slashing inference costs on SageMaker and Azure, boosting model speed with minimal code adjustments. (more)
Spur, from New York 🇺🇸, raised $4.5 million in Seed funding led by First Round Capital. Spur is a no-code test automation platform that uses AI to generate website testing scripts automatically. (more)
Wasp, from Zagreb 🇭🇷, raised $3.7 million in Seed funding led by HV Capital. Wasp offers a declarative DSL for developers to create full-stack web apps with less code, integrating modern web technologies like React, Node.js, and Prisma. (more)
Riza, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $2.7 million in Seed funding led by Matrix Partners. Riza runs AI-generated code, providing a platform for automatic code execution and management. (more)
Inephany, from London 🇬🇧, raised $2.2 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Amadeus Capital Partners. Inephany is enhancing AI training and deployment by building revolutionary foundation models that improve the efficiency and intelligence of other AI systems. (more)
Qwerky AI, from Columbia 🇺🇸, raised $2 million in Seed funding. Qwerky AI offers conversational AI that provides interactions feeling like real, natural conversations. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
Revrod, from Tel Aviv 🇮🇱, was acquired by Torq for $20 million. Revrod specialises in agentic infrastructure and orchestration, providing streamlined DevOps solutions. (more)
Fennel, from Menlo Park 🇺🇸, was acquired by Databricks. Fennel is a modern feature engineering platform that enhances machine learning operations with tools for authoring, computing, storing, serving, monitoring, and governing both real-time and batch ML features. (more)
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
yeongpin / cursor-free-vip (✩ 8,715 stars this week) - Cursor Free VIP.
virattt / ai-hedge-fund (✩ 4,965 stars this week) - An AI Hedge Fund Team.
n8n-io / n8n (✩ 3,895 stars this week) - Fair-code workflow automation platform with native AI capabilities. Combine visual building with custom code, self-host or cloud, 400+ integrations.
👍 Trending Developer-First Products on ProductHunt
Scrimba Fullstack (👍 911) - Scrimba Fullstack blends video tutorials with live coding, making it feel like you're pair programming with the teacher. Watch the teacher code, jump into the IDE to practice instantly, and get AI feedback to sharpen your fullstack skills, all in your browser.
Boxo (👍 619) - Boxo lets you instantly embed AI-generated screens into your mobile app—no complex integration needed. Works with any AI tools like Lovable, Bolt, v0 and Replit. Supports native features like haptics, auth, and payments. Build faster. Launch smarter.
Aqua Voice (👍 528) - Aqua is super fast AI dictation that lets you talk into any text field -- Cursor, Gmail, Slack, even your terminal. It starts up in under 50ms, inserts text as fast as 450ms, and has state-of-the-art accuracy. Write 4x faster anywhere with Aqua.
P.S.: shoutout to my friends at Picsellia 🇫🇷 who launched Atlas, an open-source Vision AI Agent, allowing you to interact with visual data using natural language.