GitHub Fund 2024 and beyond: Looking to the future

Fund news

In our inaugural year, the GitHub Fund, in partnership with M12, reviewed +350 open source startups across various developer tools domains, devtools, AI and AI infrastructure, security, cloud-native infrastructure, and more.

As we look ahead, we continue to have conviction and excitement about the future of open source and the developers that power it. Our vision to invest in promising open source startups and provide resources to support the companies in support of their vision is stronger than ever. Our goal is to invest to strengthen the OSS ecosystem and GitHub, prove open source is financially viable, and enable paradigm shifting technologies.

We’re excited to share that our commitment remains strong to invest in another group of companies in 2024. Let’s take a look at what we’ve achieved in our first year, as well as look at what’s to come.

Inaugural investments

We have invested in 10 companies that share our belief that open source is the life blood of software, developers are the heartbeat of innovation, and are solving real developer pain points. Here are some of companies we invested in:

• Bytewax, a Python framework and Rust distributed processing engine that simplifies event and event stream processing.
• CodeSee, a developer IDE visualization platform that improves how folks collaborate on complex codebases and highlights open source projects with Open Source Hub.
• Novu, a unified API and infrastructure for sending notifications through multiple channels for custom workflows and conditions.
• OpenSauced, a software tool to measure open source projects and provide analytics and insights making it easier to contribute and support open source projects.
• Rubbrband, an open source tool that provides evaluation that detects deformities in images generated by generative AI images.
• ToolJet, an open source low code platform that automates the generation of internal tools and business applications for the enterprise.
• Unify (formerly Ivy ML), an AI interoperability machine learning framework for autotuning and transpiling ML models into any framework.
• As well as a few more that we will announce next year!

We are thrilled to join these amazing founders and teams to help them grow and succeed. It is our pleasure to help them grow their community form and support the maturation of their products and businesses.

First year highlights!

In addition to these investments, here are some highlights and learnings from our first year.

• Helped our companies benchmark their project and grow their communities with best practices, insights, and connections.
• Provided unique opportunities such as speaking at GitHub Universe, company spotlights to leadership, features on GitHub Start-it-Up series, and inclusion in programs offering GPU access for model training and tuning.
• Formed connections with product teams and leaders across GitHub and Microsoft that provided insights on GTM, sales strategy, product differentiation, and led to design partnerships.
• Hosted a founder pitch event at GitHub Universe 2023 and met with +20 founders.
• The early stage open source community has a strong appetite for GitHub to lead the OSS ecosystem in investing in startups

“Sharing our journey on GitHub isn’t just about showing off code, it’s about building bridges. The connections we’ve forged with users, contributors, and partners have become instrumental in shaping and advancing ToolJet’s mission.” – Naveenth Padanna Kalathil, founder and CEO, Tooljet 

Looking ahead

Our investments will create new paths to grow open source companies and careers, and accelerate paradigm shifting technologies. We expect to invest somewhere between 8-10 innovative startups, on pace with last year, with a focus on AI, security, infrastructure, and DevOps. We are excited by the trends we are seeing with Generative AI, LLM, AI-powered developer tools, and security.

If you are an open source first company, a maintainer or open source builder raising venture capital we would love to hear from you. Please submit your interest here. We look forward to connecting with you.

Written by

Stormy Peters

@stormypeters