Umur Cubukcu is Co-Founder of Ubicloud, the open source and portable cloud that can reduce cloud spend by 3–10x. Their project, also called ubicloud, has over 3K stars and provides elastic compute, block storage, virtual networking, managed Postgres, and IAM services. Ubicloud has raised $16M from investors including 500 Global and YC. In this epis…

Michael Stonebraker is a legendary database system pioneer as the founder of Ingres, Postgres, and now DBOS. His work while at Berkeley and then MIT has been central to many relational database companies. His new company, DBOS, has raised $9M from investors including Engine Ventures and Construct Capital. This episode is a masterclass on the histor…

John Viega is Co-Founder & CEO of Crash Override, the open source monitoring platform based on the Chalk project which has 22K stars on GitHub. Crash Override has raised $14M from investors including SYN Ventures, BVP & Firestreak Ventures. In this episode, we dig into what being "dev friendly" means, what their best performing content has been, st…

Jeff Huber is Co-Founder of Chroma, the open source vector database. Their open source project, also called chroma, has 13K stars on GitHub. Chroma has raised $20M from investors including Quiet Ventures and Bloomberg Beta. In this episode, we dig into why vector databases are important for AI applications & why AI workloads are different, how thei…

John Britton & Mike McQuaid are Co-Founders of Workbrew, the company that provides additional features and support for companies using Homebrew. Homebrew's main project, brew, is a wildly popular open source project with 40K GitHub stars and provides the missing package manager for macOS (or Linux). In this episode, we dig into John & Mike's histor…

Brian Raymond is Founder & CEO of Unstructured, the platform to extract and transform complex data for use with every major vector database and LLM framework. Their open source project has 7K stars on GitHub and includes libraries and APIs that let users build custom preprocessing pipelines for labeling, training, and production machine learning pi…

Jake Moshenko is Co-Founder & CEO of AuthZed, the scalable authorization platform based on Google's Zanzibar white paper. Their open source permissions database spiceDB has 5K stars on GitHub and enables fine-grained access control for customer applications. AuthZed has raised $4M from investors including Work-Bench and Amplify. In this episode, we…

Joran Dirk Greef is Founder & CEO of TigerBeetle, the open source financial transactions database. Their project, also called tigerbeetle, has over 7K stars and is a database designed for mission-critical workloads and performance. TigerBeetle has raised $6M from investors including Amplify. In this episode, we discuss why general purpose databases…

Niko West is Co-Founder & CEO of Rerun, the open source visualization engine for streams of multimodal data. Rerun has raised over $3M from investors including Costanoa. In this episode, we discuss how Rerun found early success in gaming, why building in Rust was important, how open source expanded the segments Rerun could serve, why they thought a…

Ketan Umare is Co-Founder & CEO of Union AI, the scalable MLOps platform focused on AI orchestration based on the flyte open source project. Union AI has raised $29M from investors including NEA & Nava Ventures. In this episode, we dig into the differences between Union AI and Airflow, what's unique about orchestrating AI workloads, bringing softwa…

Sahil Chaudhary is Founder of Glaive AI, the platform to build models that are faster, cheaper and outperform general purpose models with the help of synthetic data. In this episode, we discuss why education is so important for GenAI infra companies at this stage, how synthetic data helps companies move from prototype to production, why synthetic d…

André Eriksson is Founder & CEO of Encore, the backend development platform for startups building event-driven and distributed systems. This is Andre's second time on the Open Source Startup Podcast (first episode here) and, in this episode, we dig into their GTM strategy, why it was important for them to add Typescript support (in addition to Go),…

Avery Pennarun is Co-Founder & CEO of Tailscale, the Wireguard-based VPN that reimagines secure, private networks. Tailscale has raised $115M from investors including Heavybit, Accel, CRV, and Insight. In this episode, we dig into what caused the team to reimagine zero trust security at the networking level, why they focus both on individual develo…

Yingjun Wu is Founder of RisingWave, a new open source stream processing database. RisingWave has raised $40M from investors including Yunqi Partners. In this episode, we discuss RisingWave's approach versus Apache Flink and other stream processing frameworks, why stream processing is important for real-time monitoring use cases, why they initially…

Andrew Hoh is Co-Founder of LastMile AI, the AI developer platform for engineering teams to productionize LLM applications. They take an "open periphery" stance on open source with projects like AIConfig to help developers build AI applications. LastMile AI has raised $10M from investors including Gradient, AME, Exceptional Capital, and Firsthand A…

Loris Degioanni is Founder & CTO of Sysdig, the observability and container security company behind the Falco and Sysdig open source projects. Both projects are widely adopted, with 7K GitHub Stars each. Sysdig is a $2.5B company that has raised over $700M from investors including Insight, Accel, Bain, DFJ, Goldman Sachs, Third Point & Permira. In …

Russ d'Sa is Founder of LiveKit, the real-time streaming audio, video, and data infrastructure platform for developers. Their open source project, also called livekit, provides the end-to-end stack for WebRTC and has over 6K stars on GitHub. In this episode, we dig into LiveKit's unique founding story with the idea coming from the founders' experie…

Jeu George is Co-Founder & CEO of Orkes, the orchestration engine based on the Conductor project. Conductor was originally created at Netflix but they have since discontinued support of the project. The team at Orkes has forked the project and is building a company around it. In this episode, we talk through the Conductor journey - from creating th…

Kyle Carberry is Founder & CTO of Coder, the self-hosted remote development platform. Their project, also called coder, enables users to provision remote development environments via Terraform and has over 6K Github Stars. In this episode, we dig into the evolution of the browser-based coding movement, how Coder massively improved developer experie…

Charlie Marsh is Founder & CEO of Astral, builders of next-gen python tooling. Their first project, ruff, is an extremely fast Python linter and code formatter written in Rust and has 22K GitHub Stars. In this episode, we dig into why they started with a linter, getting to 8.5M monthly downloads, the impact of building with Rust, how they developed…

Jeff Cross is Co-Founder & CEO of Nx, the build system for maintaining and scaling monorepos, both locally and on CI. Their project, also called nx, has over 20K stars on GitHub. Nx has raised $25M from investors including a16z & Nexus. In this episode, we discuss the benefits of using monorepos and the types of teams and codebases it works well fo…

Kyle Mathews is Co-Founder & CTO of Gatsby, the front-end web development platform. Their open source framework, GatsbyJS, is widely adopted with 55K GitHub Stars. In Feb 2023, Gatsby was acquired by Netlify. In this episode, we discuss how GatsbyJS was able to grow incredibly fast, what features matter most for front-end development frameworks (sp…

Pranay Prateek is Co-Founder of Signoz, the open source observability platform with OpenTelemetry-native traces, metrics, and logs. Their open source project, also called Signoz, has over 15K GitHub Stars and helps developers monitor their applications and troubleshoot problems. Signoz has raised $7M from investors including SignalFire and Uncorrel…

Mars Lan is Co-Founder and CTO of Metaphor, the modern data catalog that is described as the "Social Platform for Data." Metaphor was created by the founders of ⁠DataHub⁠ which is known as the leading open source metadata platform. Metaphor has raised over $10M from investors including Amplify, a16z, and Point72 Ventures. In this episode, we dig in…

Moses Guttmann is Co-Founder and CEO of ClearML, the end-to-end AI lifecycle platform for deep learning, machine learning, and Gen AI models. The company's project, also called clearml, provides experiment management, MLOps and data management capabilities and has 5K stars on GitHub. In this episode, we dig into the process of spinning out a projec…

Tianqi Chen is Co-Founder and Chief Technologist of OctoML, the compute infrastructure platform for tuning and running generative models in the cloud. OctoML was founded by the creators of Apache TVM, the machine learning compiler framework for CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators. OctoML has raised $132M from investors including Amplify, Addition, Madrona…

Toni de la Fuente is Founder of ProwlerPro, the cloud security platform built on top of Prowler, the open source security tool that helps companies implement security best practices including assessments, audits, and scanning. In this episode, we dig into the importance of good documentation, the industry events that helped Prowler gain momentum, s…

Fredrik Björk is Founder & CEO of Grafbase, the API platform for developers to deploy high performance, scaleable GraphQL APIs. Grafbase has raised $7M+ from investors including Next47 and Uncorrelated Ventures. In this episode, we dig into what a “unified data layer” is and why it’s needed, how they found their early adopters in industries like e-…

Adam Jacob is CEO of DevOps platform System Initiative and Co-Founder of infrastructure automation platform Chef. This is Adam's second time on the Open Source Startup Podcast, and this episode is packed with learnings. We discuss the distribution benefits of open source and why some products should be open source and others should not, challenges …

Soren Martius is Co-Founder & CEO of Terramate, the infrastructure-as-code management platform that sits on top of Terraform. Their open source project, also called Terramate, has 3K GitHub stars and adds capabilities such as code generation, stacks, orchestration, change detection, and data sharing to Terraform. In this episode, we discuss buildin…

Linda Lian is Co-founder & CEO of Common Room, the community-led growth platform. Common Room has raised $53M from investors including Greylock and Index. In this episode, we discuss the DevRel role and Common Room's journey from being a DevRel tool to a GTM tool, how Common Room solves a top 3 problem for their users, and much more!…

Amr Awadallah is CEO of Vectara, the LLM search engine that's powered by users' own data. Amr was previously the Founder & CTO of Cloudera and brings many learnings from that experience to Vectara, including what to open source vs. keep proprietary. Vectara has raised $29M from investors including Race Capital. In this episode, we dig into the impo…

Yury Selivanov is the Co-founder & CEO of EdgeDB, the open-source database designed as a successor to SQL and the relational paradigm. Their open source graph-relational database, edgeDB, has a built-in migration system and a next-generation query language. EdgeDB has raised $19M from investors including Accel, Nava Ventures, and Pear VC. In this e…

Graham Neray is Co-founder & CEO of Oso, the authorization-as-a-service platform that created open source oso - a batteries-included framework for building authorization into applications. Oso has raised $26M from investors including Felicis and Sequoia. In this episode, we dig into the first thing Oso founders built (a programming language created…

Nick Schrock is Founder of Dagster Labs & Creator of Dagster - the open source orchestration platform for the development, production, and observation of data assets. Dagster Labs has raised just under $50M from investors including Sequoia, Index, and Georgian Partners. In this episode, we discuss how Dagster is bringing software engineering princi…

Paul Butler is the Founder of Drifting in Space, the company focused on making browser-based applications accessible to everyone. They've created Jamsocket, a platform for building applications with session backends, and Plane, the open-source server that powers it. In this episode, we dig into the future of browser-based tech and how industrial co…

Varun Mohan is Co-founder & CEO of Codeium, the AI-powered coding platform for developers. In this episode, we dig into competing with a behemoth like GitHub Copilot, how developing their own infrastructure has enabled incredible scale, building a 30K person community, and much more!

Pierre Burgy is Co-Founder & CEO of Strapi, the open source Node.js headless CMS. Their open source project has over 55K stars on GitHub and is 100% JavaScript, fully customizable, and built developer-first. Strapi has raised $45M from investors including CRV, Index, and Accel. In this episode, we discuss the project's origins and impressive growth…

Samuel Colvin is Founder of Pydantic, the wildly popular data validation framework and cloud services platform. Their open source Python library has over 15K GitHub Stars and millions of downloads per day. Pydantic has raised $4M from investors including Sequoia Capital and Partech. In this episode, we dig into Pydantic's growth curve (linear follo…

Hassy Veldstra is Founder of Artillery, the cloud-scale serverless load testing platform. The company's project, also called artillery, has almost 7K stars on GitHub. Artillery has raised over $2M from investors including YC. In this episode, we discuss building a company around your own pain point, early signals that there was strong company poten…

Kanjun Qiu is Cofounder & CEO of Generally Intelligent, the platform to develop general-purpose AI agents that can be safely deployed in the real world. Generally Intelligent has raised $20M from investors including the Astera Institute & YC. In this episode, we dig into the future for AI agents and where they fall short today, why they open source…

Paul Dix is Cofounder & CTO of open source time series data company InfluxData. The company's open source datastore, InfluxDB, has 26K stars on GitHub. InfluxData has raised over $200M from investors including Norwest, Battery, and Sapphire Ventures. In this episode, we dig into building the category of time series data, how an open source company'…

Shivansh Vij is Founder & CEO of Loophole Labs, the modern application delivery platform. They have a number of open source projects that provide primitives for modern development. In this episode, we dig into Loophole's projects around WASM and networking, their unique hiring process, learnings for ambitious open source founders & much more!…

Eliot Horowitz is Founder & CEO of robot developer platform Viam and the previous Founder & CTO of developer data platform MongoDB. In this episode, we discuss Eliot's many learnings from being a multi-time founder including the importance of extremely fast response time to user questions, the benefits (and challenges) of building general purpose p…

Ben Rometsch is Co-Founder & CEO of Flagsmith, the commercial open source real-time feature flagging platform. The Flagsmith project has almost 3K stars on GitHub and provides feature flagging and remote configuration services that can be hosted on prem or using their hosted software. In this episode, we discuss building a startup in a profitable w…

Quentin de Quelen is Co-Founder & CEO of Meilisearch, the open source search engine platform. The Meilisearch project has 38K stars on GitHub and allows companies to quickly create amazing search experiences with features that work out-of-the-box. Meilisearch has raised $22M from investors including Felicis and CRV. In this episode, we dig into the…

Robert Brooks IV & Mitesh Agrawal are part of Lambda's founding team which is making GPUs for deep learning more accessible. Lambda has an initiative to make GPUs available for training an open source foundation model in support of the broader ML community. In this episode, we dig into the GPUs for open source initiative, why open source matters fo…

Hong Wang is Founder & CEO of Akuity, the application delivery platform for companies building with kubernetes. Akuity works alongside the Argo Project which provides a suite of open source tools for deploying and running applications and workloads on Kubernetes. Akuity has raised $25M from investors including Decibel Partners and Lead Edge Capital…

Or Weis is Co-founder & CEO of Permit.io, the open source fullstack permissions as a service platform. The company's project, opal, is an admin layer for policy engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) and AWS' Cedar Agent and brings open-policy up to the speed needed by live applications. Permit.io has raised $6M from investors including NFX. In th…

Abby Kearns has a long history in the open source ecosystem as the previous CTO of infrastructure automation platform Puppet, previous CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation, and an active investor and advisor to many open source startups. In this episode, we dig into the Puppet journey, the role organizations like Cloud Foundry play in the open source ec…