Open-source software used to be poorly understood by commercial forces, and it’s often approached in a biased way. A new generation of investment funds goes to show that things are changing.

Open source software is a lot of things to a lot of people. For some people — engineers, mostly — it’s a way to work on their passion, be involved in a community, and give something back to the world. For others — business people, mostly — it’s a way to grow projects organically and sell software without actually investing too much in sales.

It’s a nuanced topic, and we’ve tried to explore it from many angles. From the business angle, we’ve explored open source vendors relationships with hyperscalers, mostly Google and Amazon. From the contributor and license engineering angle, we’ve explored different models for commercial open source projects. And from the community angle, we’ve explored metrics for community health and value generation evaluation.

Today, we explore open source software (OSS) and its commercialization from yet another angle: the investment angle. There are a couple of venture capitals out there that seem to be ahead of the curve in terms of their understanding of, and investment in, commercial open source companies. Runa Capital is one of them, and we caught up with Konstantin Vinogradov, Runa Capital Principal, who shared his views, findings, and outlook for commercial OSS.

Runa Capital was established in 2010, and it supports founders who are building disrupting companies across three areas: B2B SaaS, deep tech (middleware, open source platforms, machine learning, and cloud infrastructure), and software for regulated industries (fintech, edutech, and digital health).

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