Atai Barkai is Co-Founder & CEO of Copilotkit, the platform to build production-grade AI Copilots 10x faster. Their open source project, also called copilotkit, has almost 13K stars on GitHub and provides React UI + elegant infrastructure for AI Copilots, in-app AI agents, AI chatbots, and AI-powered Textareas. In this episode, we dig into Copilotk…

Lauren Long is Co-Founder & CTO of Ampersand, the developer platform for native product integrations. Ampersand has raised $5M from investors including Matrix, Base Case Capital, Flex Capital, and 2.12 Angels. In this episode, we dig into their differentiation as a "code-first" product, why they focused on the GTM vertical to start (Salesforce was …

Philippe Noël is Co-Founder & CEO of ParadeDB, the modern Elasticsearch alternative built on Postgres. They're purpose-built for heavy, real-time workloads and their open source project, also called paradedb, has over 6K stars on GitHub. ParadeDB has raised $2M from investors including General Catalyst & YC. In this episode, we dig into the benefit…

Eric Futoran is Co-Founder & CEO of Embrace, the mobile observability platform built on OpenTelemetry. Embrace has raised almost $80M from investors including NEA, Greycroft & Eniac. In this episode, we dig into the creation of mobile observability as a category and how Embrace helped evangelize it, what makes mobile observability unique, why they …

Ivan Burazin is Co-Founder & CEO of Daytona, the open source developer environment management platform. Their open source manager, also called daytona, has 9K stars on GitHub. Daytona has raised $5M from investors including Upfront Ventures. In this episode, we dig into Daytona's plan to be the fastest growing cloud development environment, how con…

Steven Tey is Founder & CEO of Dub.co, the open source link management infrastructure platform for modern marketing teams. Their open source project, also called dub, has almost 18K stars on GitHub and is used by teams at companies like Vercel, Raycast, and Perplexity. In this episode, we dig into starting Dub.co as a side project and how it ultima…

Lukas Schulte is Co-Founder and CEO of SDF Labs (Semantic Data Fabric), the data transformation layer and query engine platform. They're an open core company powered by the Apache Data Fusion query engine. SDF Labs has raised $9M from investors including RTP Global and Two Sigma Ventures. In this episode, we dig into the complications and pain poin…

Sameer Al-Sakran is CEO of Metabase, the open-source analytics and business intelligence platform. Their open source project, also called metabase, has over 38K stars on GitHub. Metabase has raised $51M from investors including NEA, Insight and Expa. In this episode, we dig into the company's 10 year journey, what it means to have a "developer frie…

Stanislas Polu is Co-Founder of Dust, the platform for companies to create and operate custom AI assistants for a range of use cases. Dust has raised $20M from investors including Sequoia. In this episode, we dig into the diverse set of users and use cases for Dust, how Dust spreads within an organization, their unique approach to open source, comp…

Jonathan Schneider is Co-Founder & CEO of Moderne, the platform for code migrations. Moderne has raised up to a Series A from investors including Intel Capital and True Ventures. In this episode, we dig into the importance of software refactoring and the security and engineering challenges that come up when code isn't maintained, why they started w…

James Perkins is Co-Founder & CEO of Unkey, the open source API management platform that helps developers secure, manage, and scale their APIs. Their project, also called unkey, has almost 3K stars on GitHub. Unkey has raised from investors including Essence VC, Sunflower, and The New Normal Fund. In this episode, we dig into the complicated API to…

Lukas Gentele is Co-Founder & CEO of Loft, the platform engineering company behind "kubernetes virtualization" to reduce costs and create efficiencies for teams with high (and growing) kubernetes usage. They allow any organization to scale self-service access to Kubernetes from 10 to 10,000 engineers. Loft recently raised $24M led by Khosla Venture…

Aliaksandr Valialkin and Roman Khavronenko are Co-Founders of VictoriaMetrics, the open source time series database and monitoring platform built alongside their open source project, also called victoriametrics. In this episode, we discuss the limitations to Prometheus and how ClickHouse inspired the founders to build VictoriaMetrics, how open sour…

Lars Kamp is Co-Founder & CEO of Fix, the continuous cloud security platform to help detect, prioritize, and remediate critical cloud risks using open source software like their inventory scanner. In this episode, we discuss the importance of getting CISOs involved early for solutions that touch developers and security teams, the importance of an a…

Tim Delisle and Nico Joseph are Co-Founders of FiveOneFour, the company attempting to bring a software developer-like experience to data and analytics stacks. Together, they're second-time founders who previously founded data integration company Datalogue, which Nike acquired in 2021. In this episode, we break down the software engineering practice…

Tomer Shiran is Founder of Dremio, the data lakehouse platform for self-service analytics and AI based on open source frameworks Apache Arrow, which the Dremio team created, and Apache Iceberg. Dremio has raised over $400M from investors including Norwest, Redpoint, Adams Street, Sapphire, Insight, and Lightspeed. They are currently valued at $2B. …

Ari Zilka is CEO of mydecisive.ai, the general-purpose observability engine built on OpenTelemetry. Ari was previously the CTO of Hortonworks which built products on top of open source Apache Hadoop and merged with Cloudera in 2019. In this episode, we dig into the similar patterns Ari sees between Hortonworks / Hadoop and mydecisive.ai / OpenTelem…

Mark Huang is Co-Founder of Gradient, the platform for enterprise agentic automation. Gradient recently open sourced their 4M context window finetune of Llama-3, which is the longest context window available today. Gradient has raised $10M from investors including Wing VC, Mango Capital, and Tokyo Black. In this episode, we dig into enterprise read…

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…