ROSS Index: the fastest-growing open-source startups, every quarter

We select the top-20 open-source startups by their growth at Github quarterly. The transparent and measurable methodology allows to call it Runa Open Source Startup (ROSS) Index

Runa actively invests in OSS startups (like Nginx and MariaDB) and considers an active developer community to be instrumental for open-source businesses. We look for promising companies with a fast-growing army of fans, track them at Github, and decided to open-source our findings as an index.

ROSS index highlights top-20 open-source startups by the annualised growth rate (AGR) of Github stars at their repositories. While these stars are not a perfect metric for community evaluation, they allow us to understand which OSS products were on top of developers’ mind last quarter. Our index is transparent, measurable and fully focused on startups.

Learn more about our methodology

Methodology

We collect data on Github repos with 1,000+ stars and compare their metrics at the beginning and the end of every quarter. Afterwards, all repositories are manually checked by our investment team and only startups are selected. For purposes of the ROSS index, we define a “startup” as:

  1. a product-focused commercial organization
  2. its product have any meaningful connection with open-source repos
  3. founded less than 10 years ago
  4. raised less than $100M in total known funding
  5. was not acquired or went public before the end of the target quarter

ROSS index uses only public data from Github, Crunchbase, mass media, and other sources. We strive to show cities and countries connected with the origin of companies, not just formal HQ locations. We are purely focused on companies using the English language in descriptions at their repos and corporate websites, so some local startups (e.g. Chinese) could be missed in the index.

Given the open-source nature of data, some inaccuracies are possible. For the avoidance of doubt, Runa Capital does not use any private information received from startups.

Annualised growth rate is calculated in the following way: AGR = (value now / value 1 quarter ago)⁴ – 1.

The fastest-growing open-source startups (Q1 2021)

News and updates

Contributors are welcome!

We consider the ROSS index as a live project evolving with the help of the tech community. Don’t hesitate to share your comments and ideas regarding the index with its curator, Konstantin Vinogradov ([email protected]).