Open-source continues to drive innovation, and 2024 has proven to be an exceptional year for startups launching groundbreaking projects. We analyzed the most starred open-source projects launched by startups in 2024. Thematically, AI led the charge as the most popular type of open-source project, with AI-enabled Developer Tools just a little behind. Python reigned as the programming language of choice. The United States generated the most projects, followed by China. The importance of open source cannot be overstated, as it fuels collaboration, accelerates technological progress, and empowers developers worldwide to shape the future of technology.
The top three most starred open-source projects released by startups were Zed, xAI Grok-1, and All Hands OpenHands (fka OpenDevin).
Most projects benefited from large spikes when the project was initially released. The median month-over-month growth across all the projects was ~15%.
The most popular project category was AI, followed by AI-enabled Developer Tools, Developer Tools, Blockchain, and Finance. It was surprising that an open-source security project did not make the top 20. Within AI, technology buckets included AI models (xAI Grok-1, HPC-AI Tech Open-Sora, and BFL Flox); unstructured data infrastructure like web scrapping and OCR (Mendable Firecrawl, ScrapeGraphAI, and Datalab Surya); Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Infiniflow Ragflow and Cinnamon Kotaemon); AI agents (OpenAI Swarm and Composio); and local AI infra (Exo).
AI-enabled Developer Tools emerged as a transformative force in software development, becoming a significant trend due to their profound impact on productivity, code quality, and the overall development process. There are many deployment approaches for AI coding agents, from an AI-native IDE (Zed) to Docker application (All Hands OpenHands and Asterisk Devika) to IDE extension (Cline). Some projects focus on specialized tasks like frontend development (W&B OpenUI).
In 2024, Python was the most popular language among the top 20 projects at 60%. Javascript and Typescript followed at 25%. Last were Ruby at 10% and Rust at 5%.
One of the most notable aspects of open-source projects is their global reach. While 65% of the top 20 projects stemmed from the U.S., 10% came from China. Projects from Canada, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, and the UK rounded out the list.
We believe in the transformative power of open source to drive collaboration, fuel innovation, and amplify the growth of startups. Open source isn’t just a development model; it’s a movement that breaks down barriers, enabling developers and organizations to share knowledge, iterate faster, and co-create solutions that push the boundaries of what’s possible. At Felicis, we’ve been honored to partner with open-source companies like Dylibso, Flower.dev, Letta, Meilisearch, Moondream, Motherduck, n8n, Oso, Weights & Biases, Wherobots, Semgrep, Supabase, Sourcegraph, and Zylon. As we look to the future, we’re doubling down on open-source investing.
If you are building an open-source company, reach out to me at astasia@felicis.com.
Top 20 Most Starred Open-Source Projects Launched by Startups in 2024
Zed [zed-industries/zed, 51.6K stars, AI-endabled Developer Tool, USA]. Zed is a next-generation code editor designed for high-performance collaboration with humans and AI.
xAI [xai-org/grok-1, 49.7K stars, AI, USA]. xAI is a company working on building artificial intelligence to accelerate human scientific discovery
All Hands AI [All-Hands-AI/OpenHands, 38.7K stars, AI-enabled Developer Tool, USA]. All Hands AI is a company making open source AI to help developers build software.
Maybe [maybe-finance/maybe, 35.4K stars, Finance, USA]. Maybe offers modern financial planning and wealth management.
Astral [astral-sh/uv, 32.8K stars, Developer Tool, USA]. Astral builds high-performance developer tools for the Python ecosystem. UV is an extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust.
Puter [heyputer/puter, 27K stars, Developer Tool, Canada]. Puter is an advanced, open-source internet operating system designed to be feature-rich, exceptionally fast, and highly extensible.
InfiniFlow [infiniflow/ragflow, 25.6K stars, AI, China]. RAGFlow is an open-source Retrieval-Augmented Generation [RAG] engine based on deep document understanding.
Shardeum [shardeum/shardeum, 22.9K stars, Blockchain, Switzerland]. Shardeum is an innovative EVM-compliant blockchain platform that leverages dynamic state sharding to achieve unprecedented scalability.
HPC-AI Tech [hpcaitech/open-sora, 17.3K stars, AI, China]. HPC-AI Tech is a startup focusing on improving the efficiency of enterprise AI model training and deployment. Open-Sora is a model specifically designed for text-to-video generation.
Mendable [mendableai/firecrawl, 20.1K stars, AI, USA]. Mendable is an all-in-one platform for building AI chat apps. Mendable released Firecrawl, an API service that takes a URL, crawls it, and converts it into clean markdown or structured data.
Weights and Biases [wandb/openui, 19.5K, AI-enabled Developer Tool, USA]. Weights & Biases is the AI developer platform powering the generative AI industry. Weights and Biases released OpenUI, a tool for creating UI components using natural language descriptions and instantly visualizing them.
Asterisk [stitionai/devika, 18.6K stars, AI-enabled Developer Tool, USA]. Asterisk is an AI Agent that finds, verifies, and patches security vulnerabilities in codebases. The team at Asterisk developed Devika, an Agentic AI software engineer that can understand high-level human instructions, break them down into steps, research relevant information, and write code to achieve the given objective.
Black Forest Labs [black-forest-labs/flux, 18.5K stars, AI, USA]. Black Forest Labs is an AI team that’s on a mission to build the world’s best open visual models for developers. This repo contains the minimal inference code to run image generation and editing with BFL’s Flux models.
Cinnamon AI [cinnamon/kotaemon, 18K stars, AI, Japan]. Cinnamon AI provides an AI platform for enterprises to utilize unstructured data. Cinnamon AI released Koteamon, an open-source clean & customizable RAG UI for chatting with your documents.
EXO Labs [exo-explore/exo, 17.5K stars, AI, UK]. Exo enables users to run their own AI cluster at home with everyday devices.
OpenAI [openai/swarm, 17K stars, AI, USA]. OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits. It published Swarm, an educational framework exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration.
ScrapeGraphAI [scrapegraphai/scrapegraph-ai, 16.5K stars, AI, Italy]. ScrapeGraphAI is a web scraping Python library that uses LLM and direct graph logic to create scraping pipelines for websites and local documents (XML, HTML, JSON, Markdown, etc.).
Cline [cline/cline, 15.1K stars, AI-enabled Developer Tool, USA]. Cline is an autonomous coding agent right in your IDE, capable of creating/editing files, executing commands, using the browser, and more with your permission every step of the way.
Datalab [vikparuchuri/surya, 14.7K stars, AI, USA]. Datalab offers AIfFor document intelligence. It developed Surya, an OCR toolkit, a suite of models for OCR in 90+ languages, line detection, layout analysis, table recognition, and reading order detection.
Composio [composiohq/composio, 13.6K stars, AI, USA]. Composio equips AI agents and LLMs with 100+ high-quality integrations via function calling.
