OSSInsight/Balderton Capital— unlocking the power of open-source
With the rise of GenerativeAI, everyone is talking about the evolution of open-source software again — and for good reason. At Balderton Capital, we’ve long been excited about the potential for open-source software, with investments like MySQL, Talend, GitGuardian and Ory in more recent years. Following our recent investment in Deepset ($30m raised to help deploy LLMs), we were keen to share our approach to sourcing great open-source companies, and our further deployment towards software companies.
Some of the key questions we ask ourselves at Balderton are: how can we, as VCs, actively contribute to OSS projects and get close to top projects? What makes highly engaged developers become champions internally? We believe that what makes open source unique is its community.
At Balderton, our desire to go deeper into trends in open-source software led us to partner with what we consider a top-tier team — with high technical proficiency and great mutual team fit.
We found working alongside OSSInsight could complement our way of tracking key open-source metrics on Github.
We came across OSSInsight through our familiarity with PingCAP in the US. PingCAP is the company behind TiDB, the most advanced, open source, distributed SQL database for building modern applications. TiDB Cloud, a fully-managed DBaaS offering of TiDB, powers OSSInsight.
Founded in 2015, PingCAP provides enterprise-level and cloud-based services and technology. World-renowned organisations across technology, financial services, and other industries trust PingCAP to handle their business-critical workloads while freeing developers to build more features faster.
During this process, we started to understand OSSInsight’s technical principles and learn more TiDB Cloud.
The team at OSSInsight prepared millions of rows of GitHub data, and extracted data for 100+ key projects, ranking them with our own growth indexes.
Together we built a dashboard which aggregates key traction of open-source companies — digging into a number of GitHub metrics (stars, forks, pull requests, commits), refreshed on a regular basis.
Through it, we’ve been able to better uncover exciting open-source company metrics as part of our due-diligence of companies, and more easily monitor key companies we are actively tracking.
At Balderton, we are excited to be championing open-source communities, and making developer communities grow while building a commercial product.
We believe OSSInsight has the potential to impact the venture capital industry by being a strong support to monitor key public metrics, analyse large datasets, and contribute to the open-source community more widely.
We look forward to future collaboration between OSSInsight and Balderton.
If you are a technical founder building in the software space, please feel free to reach out at mwehr@balderton.com. We are actively investing from late-seed to Series C and would be keen to speak with you. You can find more detail about our investment thesis on the modern data stack here and here
