DEV
DEV cofounders Peter Frank, Jess Lee, and Ben Halpern
- We asked several venture capital investors to tell us which commercial open source startups will boom in 2019.
- These startups make some of their software available as open source, which means that anyone can use, download or modify the code for free.
- Open source software is quickly becoming popular among developers and companies, so we asked these investors to name the startups they're excited about, from seed startups to ones that may make an exit soon.
Last year, open source-centric software companies were at the center of some major deals: Salesforce acquired Mulesoft, Microsoft acquired GitHub, VMware acquired Heptio, IBM announced it would acquire Red Hat, Cloudera and Hortonworks merged, and Elastic went public.
These companies often make the core of their software available as open source, which means that people can download and use the code however they want - making money by offering additional features or better technical support to business users.
While many in Silicon Valley were skeptical of this business model for a long time, investors are now betting that the open source business model will help these kinds of companies spread like wildfire and find an audience. Last year's mega-deals have shone a light on just how pervasive open source can be in the business.
Now, as we wait for the $34 billion Red Hat/IBM deal to close, we asked venture venture capital investors to name the open source software startups they believe are going to boom in 2019. Those investors named startups, both within and outside their portfolios, that they were particularly excited about for the rest of 2019.
Read more: Here's why investors are throwing money at startups that give away their software for free
What follows is a compelling list of commercial open source software startups set for success in 2019. They range from fledgling companies with hardly any funding, to well-established companies that could very well be heading for a huge exit.
The funding information is according to official announcements, as well as Crunchbase and Pitchbook, keepers of such records.