Runa Capital: Europe’s open source scene punches above Its weight in AI and Infrastructure

This week international venture capital firm Runa Capital released the latest quarterly Runa Open-Source Startup (ROSS) Index, a regularly updated ranking of the top-trending open-source startups. 

The report ranks 20 top-trending open-source startups by the annualised growth rate of GitHub stars at their repositories. 

The firm is a serial early-stage investor in deep tech startups across AI, ML and open source. It first released its Runa Open-Source Startup (ROSS) Index in 2020. 

The ROSS Index reliably predicts global funding for top-trending open-source companies.

The European open source scene is proving it can punch far above its weight, especially in infrastructure and AI-native tooling. While Silicon Valley dominates in agent frameworks and browser automation, Europe is quietly producing some of the most technically ambitious and globally relevant projects, often with less hype, more depth, and a strong open-source ethos.

According to Runa, Anoma, building a distributed operating system for intent-centric decentralised application, represents Europe’s leadership in post-blockchain thinking with deep protocol work rooted in real-world use cases. 

Similarly, Pathway is tackling the messy realities of real-time, AI-powered data pipelines, offering an elegant alternative to legacy batch-based products.

Meanwhile, Pydantic has quietly become foundational to the Python AI stack, offering strict typing and validation that’s increasingly critical in production-grade GenAI systems. 

Coderamp (with its Git-to-prompt interface) and Readest (a sleek cross-platform reader) reflect a newer generation of hacker-founders building polished, useful tools from day one. Together, they point to a uniquely European flavour of open source: less about grand narratives, more about precision engineering, developer trust, and long-term infrastructure bets.

Notably, these companies aren’t clustered in just one ecosystem. Runa Capital is seeing real dispersion (from Zug to Lyon, Berlin to London) suggesting that Europe’s strength in this cycle may lie in its distributed, resilient approach to innovation, just like the systems these startups are building.

The top 20 companies include:

🇨🇭 Anoma  (27.2K stars, 27.2x growth) is a distributed operating system for intent-centric, decentralised applications. Founded in 2020 in Zug, Switzerland. The company has raised $57.8 million from a variety of investors, including Electric, Polychain, and CMCC Global.

🇫🇷 Coderamp (7.2K stars, 7.2x growth) develops Gitingest, a tool that turns any Git repository into a prompt-friendly text. The company was founded in 2024 in Lyon, France and raised an undisclosed amount from    Kima.

🇬🇧 Pydantic (.9K stars, 6.9x growth) develops a Python agent framework designed to build production-grade applications with GenAI. The London company was founded in 2017 in London. It has raised $17.2 million from various investors, including Irregular Expressions, Sequoia,

🇩🇪 Readest (5.5K stars, 5.5x growth) is a modern, feature-rich ebook reader designed for avid readers,s offering seamless cross-platform access, powerful tools, and an intuitive interface to elevate your reading experience. is a cross-platform, feature-rich ebook reader. Founded in 2024 in Germany.    

🇫🇷 ´Pathway ( 22.4K stars, 5.1x growth) offers a real-time data processing framework for building fast, resilient, and    AI-powered data pipelines. Founded in 2020 in Paris, France. The company has raised $14.5 million from Market One, Inovo, Id4, TQ, and admos.