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It has been a busy year in the open source software sphere, from high-profile license changes to critical zero-day vulnerabilities that sent businesses into meltdown. But in among all the usual excitement that permeates the open source world, countless open source startups launched new products, attracted venture capitalist’s (VC) money, and generally reminded us of the role that open source plays in today’s technological landscape — including the data sovereignty and digital autonomy it promises companies of all sizes.

Here, we take a look at some of the fledgling commercial open source companies that gained traction in the past year, revealing where enterprises and investors are betting on the power of community-driven software.

Polar Signals: Cutting cloud bills

Continuous profiling belongs to the software monitoring category known as observability. It’s chiefly concerned with monitoring the resources that an application is using, such as CPU or memory, to give engineers deeper insights into what code — down to the line number — is consuming the most resources. This can help companies reduce their cloud bill, given that most of the major cloud platform providers charge on a consumption basis.

While there are a few continuous profiling products on the market already, Polar Signals officially went to market in October 2021 with the launch of an open source project called Parca. At the same time, Polar Signals raised $4 million in seed funding from Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV and Lightspeed, as it gears up to launch a commercial hosted product in 2022.

Unleash: Open source feature management

Feature management is an important part of the continuous release/continuous deployment (CI/CD) process, one that allows developers to test new features incrementally with a small subset of users, turn features on or off, and A/B test alternatives to gain insights into what works best — without having to ship a whole new version.

Unleash is an open source platform that promises companies greater flexibility and control over their data and feature management deployment. The company raised $2.5 million last year to build on its recent growth, which has seen it secure customers such as Lenovo and U.S. manufacturing giant Generac.

Conduktor: A GUI for Kafka

Companies that need real-time data in their applications often use Kafka, an event streaming platform built to handle common business use-cases such as processing ecommerce payments, managing signups, matching passengers with drivers in ride-hailing apps. Around 80% of Fortune 100 companies use Kafka to store, process, and connect all their disparate data streams — but Kafka requires significant technical nous and resources to fully leverage, which is where Conduktor is setting out to help with an all-in-one graphical user interface (GUI) that makes it easier to work with Kafka via a desktop client.

Conduktor last year raised $20 million in a series A round of funding led by Accel, as it looks to “simplify working with real-time data” on the Kafka platform.

Scarf: Measuring open source software

While open source software may well have eaten the world, the developers and companies behind open source projects often lack meaningful insights into their project’s use and distribution, something that Scarf has set out to solve.

The company’s core Scarf Gateway product serves as a central access point to all open source components and packages wherever they are hosted, and provides key usage data that the registry provider typically doesn’t offer. This includes which companies are installing a particular package; which regions a project is most popular in; and what platforms or cloud providers the package is most commonly installed on — it’s similar to Google Analytics, but for open source software.

After emerging from stealth back in March with $2 million in seed funding, the company went on to raise a further $5.3 million.

Rudderstack: Leveraging customer data

Customer data platforms (CDPs) bring the utility of customer analytics to non-technical personnel such as marketers, allowing them to derive key insights from vast swathes of data — CDPs serve as a unified customer database built on real-time data such as behavioral, transactional, and demographic, drawn from myriad sources.

While there are many CDPs to choose from, RudderStack is a developer-centric, open source alternative that affords companies more flexibility in terms of how they deploy their CDP. Indeed, it’s pitched as “data warehouse-first,” which means that users can retain full control over all their data in their own warehouse.

To accelerate its growth, RudderStack last year announced a $21 million series A round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins.

AtomicJar: Integration testing

AtomicJar is setting out to commercialize Testcontainers, a popular open source integration testing framework used at major companies including Google, Oracle, and Uber.

While unit testing is all about testing individual software components in isolation, integration testing is concerned with checking that all the components operate as they should when connected together as part of an application.

Founded last March, AtomicJar has invited a number of enterprises to participate in a private beta to trial various enhancements and extensions that it’s adding to Testcontainers. To help, the company last year raised $4 million in seed funding.

Bit: Bringing microservices to the frontend

Microservices is a familiar concept in backend engineering, but it has been gaining steam in the frontend sphere too as companies explore ways to leverage a flexible, component-based architecture across the entire development process. And this is where Bit is hoping to carve its niche.

Bit provides open source tools and a cloud platform to help frontend developers collaborate and build component-driven software. At its core, Bit makes it easier for companies to split frontend development into smaller features and codebases, allowing teams to develop features independently, while continuously integrating as part of a unified application.

The company announced a $25 million series B round of funding back in November, as it prepares to launch new products such as Ripple CI, which continuously integrates component changes from across all applications and teams in an organization. Ripple CI is scheduled to launch later in 2022.

Cerbos: Managing user permissions

Companies often need to enable different user permissions in their software, so some employees can only submit expense reports, for example, while others can “approve” the expenses or mark them as “paid.” These various permissions might vary by team, department, and geographic location — and companies need to be able to set their own user permission rules.

There are plenty of tools in the identity and access management (IAM) space that allows for this already, but a young company called Cerbos is setting out to streamline how software developers and engineers manage user permissions, while also addressing the myriad access control compliance requirements driven by regulations and standards such as GDPR and ISO-27001.

Cerbos is adopting a self-hosted, open source approach to the user permissions problem, one that works across languages and frameworks — and one that gives companies full visibility into how it’s handling user data. To help build a commercial product on top of the open source platform, Cerbos recently announced it had raised $3.5 million in a seed round of funding.

Chatwoot: Customer engagement

Chatwoot has built an open source platform to challenge some of the major players in the customer engagement software space, including the multi-billion dollar publicly-traded company Zendesk.

The core Chatwoot platform constitutes a shared inbox that allows companies to connect all their various communication channels in a single, centralized location, while it also offers a live chat tool, native mobile apps, and myriad out-of-the-box integrations. As with other open source companies, Chatwoot promises greater data control and extensibility versus the proprietary incumbents.

The Y Combinator (YC) alum announced a $1.6 million seed round of funding back in September.

Cal.com: An open source Calendly alternative

With Calendly now a $3 billion company, this has shone a light on the broader meeting scheduling space as companies search for new tools to cut down on needless, repetitive admin.

With that in mind, Cal.com last year launched what it calls “scheduling infrastructure for everyone,” aimed at anyone from yoga instructors and SMEs all the way through to enterprises. Similar to Calendly, meeting organizers use Cal.com to share a scheduling link with invitees, who are then asked to choose from a set of time slots — the slot that everyone can make is then added to everyone’s calendar.

As an open source product available via GitHub, however, companies using Cal.com can also retain full control of all their data through self-hosting. Moreover, they can manage the entire look-and