A recent analysis indicates that over 90% of the most rapidly expanding open-source businesses in 2020 were established outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, with Europe being the origin point for 12 of the top 20. This data comes from a new study and the “ROSS Index,” developed by Runa Capital, which identifies the fastest-growing open-source startups with publicly accessible repositories on GitHub each quarter.

Notably, Plausible, identified as the fastest-growing company in the latest ranking, operates as an “open startup” – openly publishing all its key performance indicators, including revenue figures. The company’s website explicitly states its disinterest in securing funding from any source, be it individuals, organizations, or venture capital firms. It emphasizes a business approach that avoids the collection and analysis of extensive personal user data for targeted advertising, instead focusing on building a self-sufficient, privacy-respecting alternative to prevalent web analytics platforms built on surveillance capitalism.

While “GitHub stars” aren’t a flawless measure of product-market alignment for open-source companies, the research suggests a potential shift away from the venture capital-supported startups that characterized the previous decade.

Prior efforts have been made to compile comparable lists. Battery Ventures released its BOSS Index in 2017, but this index was later discontinued. In September 2020, Accel introduced its Open100 market map, showcasing a variety of open-source startups.

The composition of this company list is expected to evolve considerably with each quarterly update, as sustaining exceptionally high growth on GitHub over multiple quarters is uncommon. Consequently, the companies featured on the ROSS Index are likely to change on a regular basis.

For example, the most recent ROSS findings reveal that only four companies – Hugging Face, Meili, Prisma, and Framer – were also included in the prior list from Q2 2020.

It’s important to note that operating as open-source doesn’t preclude these companies from eventually pursuing monetization strategies or seeking venture capital investment.

Runa Capital’s motivation for publishing this list is also apparent, as the firm has made investments in several open-source startups, including Nginx (later acquired by F5 Networks for $670 million), MariaDB, and N8N. They recently secured a $157 million fund specifically dedicated to supporting open-source ventures.