Is Open Source A Good Decision for Founders & Investors?
Taking a look at the COSS report 2025 by Serena VC.
Welcome back to Open Pioneers #35.
Serena VC recently published the COSS report 2025 analyzing 25 years of venture data, tracking over 800 VC-backed commercial open source software (COSS) companies globally. The lead author of the report, Matthieu Lavergne, went out to answer a critical question:
“Is Open Source a Good Financial Decision for Founders and Investors?”
The short answer is “Yes.”
Open source companies raise their rounds faster, at higher valuations, and exit at much better valuations compared to their closed-source counterparts.
In 2024, open source proved itself as an established investment category with 211 deals and $26.4 billion in funding.
Open source companies raise their rounds more quickly and at better valuations. For instance, open source companies need 20% less time between Seed and Series A rounds, and they raise at a 1.60x higher valuation compared to closed-source companies.
While some might think these results reflect the hype around open source, the report shows that 12% of all VC-backed open source companies have reached M&A or IPO stages, demonstrating that exits in the open source space are not just achievable but a relatively likely outcome.
The most striking finding, however, is that open source companies exit at far better valuations than their closed-source counterparts. On average, open source companies are valued approximately 7.6x higher at IPO and 16x higher at M&A, based on median valuations.
My takeaway: If you are a founder and open source fits your business model, you should almost certainly pursue it. The days when a successful open source project was just a hobby are long gone—open source is now serious business. Entrepreneurs and investors who embrace the open path will be rewarded.
For more insights, check out Matthieu Lavergne’s announcement blog and the full Serena COSS Report 2025.
New & Hot Open Source Projects 🔥
pad.ws: Whiteboard as an IDE, draw and code in your browser. GitHub
Codex: Lightweight coding agent by OpenAI that runs in your terminal. GitHub
FramePack: A prediction neural network structure that generates videos progressively. Video diffusion, but feels like image diffusion. GitHub
uptime-monitor: A uptime monitoring service that is easy and cheap to run at scale. GitHub
Open Source Jobs 💼
🔥 Senior Software Engineer (remote) at Linux Foundation - We’re looking for a database wizard for my team at the Linux Foundation! Join us and help building out the world’s best dataset for open source.
Open Source Development Manager (remote) at OpenZeppelin, building security products for blockchain applications and smart contracts
Sr. Developer Advocate, ML (SF) at Databricks, an open analytics platform
Open Source Funding Rounds 💸
Supabase, an open source Firebase alternative, raised a $200M Series D on a $2B valuation. Link
Tessell, a cloud DBaaS platfornm , raised a $60M Series B. Link
Until next week,
Jonathan (@jonathimer)