The largest companies built on open source
Five charts to start your day
Good morning – here are your five chart for the day.
When I was a teenager, open source was something hobbyists did in their spare time. Now Databricks has hit a $100 billion valuation built entirely on Apache Spark, while MongoDB is trading at $32 billion.
The irony isn't lost on me. I remember the scepticism when Red Hat went public in 1999. How could you make money giving away your product? Yet here we are, with open source forming the backbone of nearly every major tech stack. What fascinates me isn't just the valuations, it's the acceleration. Companies founded after 2010 are worth multiples of firms that spent decades building the category.
Databricks has grown 61% since December alone. GitHub sold for $7.5 billion to Microsoft, yet newer players are raising at ten times that. Even Nancy Pelosi's betting on this trend, with her Databricks stake reportedly doubling to over $11 million. The real revelation: giving away your core product has become the most valuable business model in enterprise software.
CHART 1 • Largest companies built around open source
Databricks just hit a $100 billion valuation in its latest funding round, making it the fourth private company ever to cross that threshold, behind only SpaceX, ByteDance and OpenAI. The data analytics firm, built on Apache Spark, has seen its value surge 61% since December. Red Hat's $34 billion sale to IBM in 2019 suddenly looks quaint.
This chart reveals a striking pattern: the newer the company, the higher the valuation. Firms founded after 2010 dominate the upper reaches, while Red Hat – founded in 1993 – sits in the middle despite decades of dominance. Open source has become the default foundation for enterprise software, and investors are paying astronomical prices to own pieces of the infrastructure.
Source: Generative Value
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