A new report shines a light on the world of commercial open source software (COSS) startups, including which ones are growing fastest, which are raising cash and even which universities are most popular among COSS founders.

The report emanates from Runa Capital, a formerly Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that recently moved its HQ to Luxembourg. Runa previously backed a number of companies with open source foundations such as Nginx, MariaDB and N8n.

Since 2020, Runa has operated what it calls the Runa Open Source Startup (ROSS) Index, ranking the top 20 fastest-growing open source startups. While the index is focused on quarterly growth, Runa just published its first annual report looking at COSS startup trends throughout the whole of 2022, as well as some broader trends dating back to the index’s inception nearly three years ago.

Fast growing

The ROSS Index Annual Report 2022 expands its focus to the top 50 startups rather than the top 20 as per Runa’s quarterly index, revealing that the top five fastest-growing open source companies last year were Builder.io, a no-code platform for digital storefronts; Novu, which is creating a notification infrastructure for developers; Refine, a framework for web app development; Safing, which is creating data privacy products including an application firewall; and Nhost, a backend-as-a-service provider that’s setting out to rival Firebase.

The top 50 fastest-growing open source startups in 2022. Image Credits: Runa Capital

Of the 50 fastest-growing open source companies in Runa Capital’s index, 44% have raised VC funding since the beginning of 2022 including low-code web app developer Appsmith, which landed $41 million, and another Firebase rival called Appwrite, which secured $27 million.