The Full List of 26 Open Source Unicorn Startups (2026)
The open-source sector has produced a big group of billion-dollar startups.
The list includes recent entrants like Mistral AI, which reached a $14B valuation within a year of its 2023 launch. It also features established companies such as Grafana Labs, valued at $6B.
Below is the full list of 26 Open Source unicorn startups at this time.
Top 10 Most Valuable Open Source Unicorns
Mistral AI builds a suite of large language models, including both open-source and proprietary options for developers and enterprises. Their models are recognized for their strong performance and efficiency, making advanced AI more accessible.
| Valuation | $14B (Joined December 2023) |
| Headquarters | Paris, Ile-de-France, France |
| Year Founded | 2023 |
| Founders | Arthur Mensch, Charles Gorintin, Guillaume Lample, Jean Charles Samuelian, Timothee Lacroix |
| Funding Amount | €2.8B |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series C |
| Top Investors | General Catalyst, Bpifrance, NVIDIA, LocalGlobe, Andreessen Horowitz |
Grafana Labs offers a composable observability stack built around its popular open-source visualization tool, Grafana. Teams use their software to bring together metrics, logs, and traces for unified monitoring and analysis.
| Valuation | $6B (Joined March 2021) |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, United States |
| Year Founded | 2014 |
| Founders | Anthony Woods, Raj Dutt, Torkel Ödegaard |
| Funding Amount | $805.2M |
| Company Size | Major Organization (1,001-5,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series D |
| Top Investors | Coatue, Sequoia Capital, CapitalG, K5 Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners |
Odoo builds a comprehensive suite of open-source business applications that handle needs like CRM, eCommerce, accounting, and inventory. The platform's all-in-one, integrated nature allows companies to manage their entire operations from a single place.
| Valuation | $5.3B (Joined July 2021) |
| Headquarters | Louvain-la-neuve, Vlaams-Brabant, Belgium |
| Year Founded | 2005 |
| Founders | Fabien Pinckaers |
| Funding Amount | $1.1B |
| Company Size | Enterprise Organization (5,001+) |
| Last Funding Status | Private Equity |
| Top Investors | Sofinnova Partners, General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, HarbourVest Partners, BlackRock |
Sonar creates a suite of tools for developers focused on writing clean, high-quality code. Their products provide static code analysis that integrates directly into development workflows, offering both open-source and commercial solutions to catch bugs and security issues early.
| Valuation | $5B |
| Headquarters | Geneva, Geneve, Switzerland |
| Year Founded | 2008 |
| Founders | Freddy Mallet, Olivier Gaudin, Simon Brandhof |
| Funding Amount | $457M |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series B |
| Top Investors | Advent International, Insight Partners, General Catalyst, Permira |
Hugging Face operates a collaborative platform for the AI community to build, train, and deploy machine learning models. They are widely known for their open-source libraries and for hosting a massive repository of models and datasets that power AI applications.
| Valuation | $5B (Joined May 2022) |
| Headquarters | Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Year Founded | 2016 |
| Founders | Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf |
| Funding Amount | $395.2M |
| Company Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Venture Round |
| Top Investors | NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, IBM, Lux Capital |
Chainguard builds minimal, hardened container base images to help developers secure the software supply chain. These images are built with a strict focus on having zero-known vulnerabilities, giving teams a safer foundation for building and running applications.
| Valuation | $4B (Joined July 2024) |
| Headquarters | Kirkland, Washington, United States |
| Year Founded | 2021 |
| Founders | Dan Lorenc, Kim Lewandowski, Ville Aikas |
| Funding Amount | $892M |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series D |
| Top Investors | Spark Capital, General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, IVP, Lightspeed Venture Partners |
Starburst builds a data lakehouse platform that gives teams a single point of access to all their data, no matter where it lives. Their platform uses the open-source Trino query engine to help companies analyze information across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid systems without moving it.
| Valuation | $3.35B (Joined January 2021) |
| Headquarters | Boston, Massachusetts, United States |
| Year Founded | 2017 |
| Founders | Anu Sudarsan, Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski, Matt Fuller, Wojciech Biela |
| Funding Amount | $414M |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Venture Round |
| Top Investors | Index Ventures, Coatue, B Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Citi |
Together AI provides a cloud platform dedicated to building and running open-source generative AI models. Their infrastructure gives developers the power to train, fine-tune, and deploy these models at scale.
| Valuation | $3.3B (Joined March 2024) |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Year Founded | 2022 |
| Founders | Ce Zhang, Chris Re, Percy Liang, Vipul Ved Prakash |
| Funding Amount | $533.5M |
| Company Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Series B |
| Top Investors | NVIDIA, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Emergence Capital, Alumni Ventures |
Aiven built a managed platform for open-source data technologies, making it simple for businesses to run tools like Kafka and PostgreSQL on any cloud. This frees up developer teams from managing complex infrastructure so they can focus on building applications.
| Valuation | $3.21B (Joined October 2021) |
| Headquarters | Helsinki, Southern Finland, Finland |
| Year Founded | 2016 |
| Founders | Hannu Valtonen, Heikki Nousiainen, Oskari Saarenmaa |
| Funding Amount | $420M |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series D |
| Top Investors | Salesforce Ventures, IVP, Lifeline Ventures, BlackRock, Atomico |
Temporal offers an open-source platform that gives developers the tools to build highly reliable and scalable applications. The platform is known for simplifying the code behind complex, stateful workflows, ensuring they can run durably from start to finish.
| Valuation | $3B |
| Headquarters | Bellevue, Washington, United States |
| Year Founded | 2019 |
| Founders | Maxim Fateev, Samar Abbas |
| Funding Amount | $454.5M |
| Company Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Series C |
| Top Investors | Madrona, Index Ventures, StepStone Group, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management |
The Remaining 16 Open Source Unicorns
The ten most valuable companies get much of the attention, but they represent just a part of the story. The other startups on this list have raised over $4 billion combined. While most of these companies are based in the US, founders in countries like India and China are also building billion-dollar businesses. Here’s a look at the other startups that have earned their spot on the list.
| Unicorn Startup | Country | Year Founded | Amount Raised | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Sysdig | United States | 2013 | $729.5M | $3B |
 PingCAP | United States | 2015 | $641.6M | $3B |
 Redis | United States | 2011 | $356.8M | $2B |
 Kong | United States | 2017 | $344.1M | $2B |
 Anaconda | United States | 2012 | $233M | $2B |
 Airbyte | United States | 2020 | $181.2M | $2B |
 Apollo GraphQL | United States | 2016 | $152M | $2B |
 DataStax | United States | 2010 | $342.6M | $2B |
 1inch | Saint Kitts and Nevis | 2020 | $189.8M | $2B |
 Kylinsoft | China | 2020 | CN¥3B | $2B |
 Yugabyte | United States | 2016 | $291M | $1.3B |
 Anyscale | United States | 2019 | $259M | $1B |
 PostHog | United States | 2020 | $182.2M | $1B |
 MinIO | United States | 2014 | $126.3M | $1B |
 Panther | United States | 2018 | $140.5M | $1B |
 Hasura | India | 2017 | $136.5M | $1B |
