European software VC Oxx today released its ‘Rising Stars of Open Source 2025’ report.
The research, which identifies open source companies before they reach significant scale, highlights the latest trends in software development. These include how LLMs are increasingly integral in software development, how NLP and coding are becoming more connected, and how agentic AI is being integrated into workflows.
The Rising Stars research, which Oxx has been publishing since 2021, addresses the need for investors to analyse open source companies differently from companies that are commercial from the outset.
According to Bob Thomas, Partner at Oxx, open source companies often delay their commercialisation until they have reached technical maturity and achieved organic adoption.
“Oxx has developed a unique methodology for assessing such companies, which includes the Product Community Fit – a measure of how engaged contributors are with the open source software.”
There have been numerous successes from previous years. For example, Cursor – a code editor that incorporates AI tools to assist with programming, which was part of the 2023 cohort – grew to over $100 million in ARR in 12 months and also achieved unicorn status during a $105 million Series B funding round.
There have been other noteworthy financing rounds, including Suno, which raised $125 million in May 2024, and Zed AI, which raised $32 million in November 2024. And more recently, in April 2025, Supabase raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation.
According to Thomas, this year’s Rising Stars stand out because they have a strong product-community fit, and they’re also attuned to the major tectonic shifts – such as AI, automation and intelligent tooling – that are occurring beneath them.
“These open source projects, as they become businesses and scale, are successfully responding to a rapidly-changing environment and are building at the intersection of code and cognition, where generative models, natural language interfaces, and autonomous agents are redefining how software is being developed. “
Key themes in open source software
The Rising Stars of Open Source 2025 report highlights some key themes:
- LLMs are increasingly integral to software development: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is improving language models’ integration with other parts of the software stack by giving LLMs access to private data repositories at low cost.
- Natural language is being translated better into code, putting software in the hands of a user base beyond traditional software developers.
- Agentic AI is being integrated into workflows: Generative AI is showing no signs of slowing down and many Rising Stars are using AI to develop innovative, automated software tools.
- Traditional developer tooling still holds strong.
Several companies in this year’s cohort are focused on building traditional tools, such as databases, API management systems and data engineering tools, which are aimed at developers who continue to leverage the open-source ecosystem.
“We have high conviction in the 2025 Rising Stars cohort bringing a new wave of foundational technologies to market. These projects aren’t just thematically aligned with today’s trends — they’re laying the groundwork for the next generation of infrastructure and applications in B2B software,” says Thomas.
The Rising Stars of Open Source 2025 include UK and European startups:
- Apify 🇨🇿 Web scraping and data extraction platform.
- Astral 🇬🇧 High-performance Python tooling.
- FlowFuse 🇳🇱 Built around Node-RED, helps with industrial workflows.
- n8n 🇩🇪 Germany Open-source workflow automation tool.
- NetBird 🇳🇴 Norway Open-source Zero Trust Networking, based in Oslo.
Oxx partners with the most promising European B2B software companies at the scale-up stage. As a specialist SaaS investor, Oxx provides each entrepreneur with a support system of unique specialist expertise and network, and a culture of unfaltering partnership and absolute conviction.
The firm’s strategy is built around the concept of “Go-To-Market Fit”, developing a structure for thinking about how to build a repeatable, sustainable growth engine.
The report is live at oxx.vc/rising-stars
Would you like to write the first comment?
Login to post comments