The Unicorn CTO #124 - GitHub Stars and Fundraising

Daniel Jarjoura -

Hello friend,

As commercial open-source companies attract more and more VC funding, investors are trying to find new metrics to help them assess investment potential. One of these metrics is GitHub Stars. To find a potential correlation between the two, I looked at the COSS company that raised the biggest round in September 2024: Supabase.

A few days ago, Supabase announced a $80M round while going surpassing 70K GitHub stars. Is it related? I dug into the data to find out.

With each funding round, Supabase’s GitHub stars skyrocketed, from just a few thousand in 2020 to over 70,000 by 2024. This shows how investor interest can correlate closely with open-source traction and community growth metrics—not necessarily revenue (though Supabase is now generating significant revenue).

💡 Key Takeaways for Open-Source Founders

  • Community First: Investors are looking for signs of community momentum, such as GitHub stars, contributors, and Slack/Discord activity, which are often stronger signals than early revenue. Supabase is a great example of a company that’s built a solid foundation through its developer community.
  • Growth is Key: For founders, it's important to track month-over-month growth in your community engagement metrics. Supabase’s steady star growth is a perfect example of this.
  • Don’t Underestimate GitHub Stars: While some call it a “vanity metric,” many VCs still pay attention to GitHub stars, as they show the interest and adoption of your project. Supabase’s upward trend certainly grabbed investor attention.

Whether you're aiming for Seed or Series A, the key is balancing community momentum with strong storytelling. And, of course, building a great product.

P.S.: if you're a CTO or tech leader, you can join the free Unicorn CTO Slack community. We're a small group of international CTOs and tech leaders, and we often meet for virtual (or not) coffees.

Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.

💰 Market Summary - Week of September 30th, 2024

  • 12 companies raised $807.7 million across 7 product categories in 7 countries.
  • Europe-based companies attracted 63% of the total funding vs 22% for Asia-based companies (including Israël) and 15% for US-based companies.
  • DevTool is the category that attracted the highest funding.
  • 1 company was acquired.

🧩 Funding by Product Category

🌎 Funding by Region

🏢 Funding By Company

Poolside AI, based in Paris 🇫🇷, secured $500M in Series B funding to build foundational models and tools, elevating generative AI for developers. Total funding now stands at $626M with a valuation of $3B. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from several investors, including NVIDIA.

Eon, headquartered in Tel Aviv 🇮🇱, raised $77M in Series B funding from Greenoaks Capital Partners and Quiet Ventures. Eon provides a next-generation cloud backup solution with a unique autopilot feature, managing cloud backup posture efficiently.

HPC-AI Tech, located in Singapore 🇸🇬, garnered $50M in Series A funding. Known for its record-breaking AI training speeds, HPC-AI Tech is advancing enterprise AI model training with its platform, Colossal-AI. Backers included Singtel Innov8, Sinovation Ventures and others. (more)

Qodo, based in Tel Aviv 🇮🇱, achieved $50M in Series A funding led by Susa Ventures and Square Peg. Qodo enhances coding with a quality-first generative AI platform for automated code reviews and testing within IDEs. (more)

DataPelago, from Mountain View 🇺🇸, secured $47M in Series B funding. They are creating a new data processing standard suitable for the accelerated computing era. The new round was led by Eclipse Ventures, Taiwania Capital and others. (more)

Resolve AI, in San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $35M in Seed funding led by Greylock. Resolve AI focuses on automating incident resolution, allowing engineers to focus on building rather than troubleshooting. (more)

Voyage AI, headquartered in Palo Alto 🇺🇸, secured $20M in Series A funding. Voyage AI specialises in building domain-specific embedding models for enhanced retrieval accuracy. The round was led by CRV with participation from existing investors. (more)

Apono, from New York 🇺🇸, garnered $15.5M in Series A funding led by New Era Capital Partners. Apono provides a platform for automated permission management, trusted by companies like Cybereason. (more)

Thread AI, also in New York 🇺🇸, raised $6M in Seed funding. Thread AI’s Lemma platform simplifies enterprise infrastructure for AI workflows. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Greycroft and notable angels. (more)

kapa.ai, based in Copenhagen 🇩🇰, secured $3.2M in Seed funding led by Initialized with participation from Y Combinator and a roster of angel investors. kapa.ai enables developer-facing companies to build AI support bots. (more)

Runware, located in London 🇬🇧, raised $3M in Seed funding. Runware specialises in ultra-fast, low-cost generative media powered by custom hardware and green energy. Backers included A16Z’s Speedrun, LakeStar’s Halo II and others. (more)

Kavia AI, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, secured $1M in Pre-Seed funding. Kavia AI is dedicated to revolutionizing workflow management with advanced AI tools. (more)

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions

Flusk, headquartered in Amsterdam 🇳🇱, was acquired by no-code app builder Bubble to unlock enterprise-grade security for all apps. Founded in 2022, Flusk is a no-code security and monitoring tool that integrates seamlessly with Bubble apps, providing automated threat detection, error tracking, and compliance assistance.

Thanks for reading this far! I'm excited to make this newsletter as helpful as possible and I would appreciate if you could share feedback or anything you want to find here.

Farewell,

Daniel