Sunday, March 23, 2025

The 20 hottest open source startups

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Image Credits: Misha Shutkevych / Getty Images

European venture firm Runa Capital just published its latest report on the fastest-growing, startup-backed open source projects of 2024, based on GitHub "stars."

No surprise that AI was a big theme — Paul Sawers writes that it was central to 11 of the top 20 projects. (Maybe it's more surprising that AI wasn't central to the other nine…) At the top of the list was Ollama, a Y Combinator-backed startup that's built an open source tool for running models like Meta's Llama on your desktop.

Keep reading to see what else TechCrunch is covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Jens Büttner/picture alliance / Getty Images

Meta settles U.K. ad-tracking lawsuit: Human rights campaigner Tanya O'Carroll argued that a U.K. data protection law requires Facebook's parent company to respect her wishes not to be tracked for advertising. And in fact, Natasha Lomas reports Meta has agreed not to track her.

BYD plans to make EV charging as fast as pumping gas: Chinese automaker BYD recently announced that its new Han L sedan could add 248 miles of range with as little as five minutes of charging. Tim De Chant digs into the company's claims.

Everything you need to know about DeepSeek: Kyle Wiggers has the latest on DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot app that upended Silicon Valley and Wall Street earlier this year with what appeared to be powerful, low-cost models.

What else we're reading 📗

Wired spoke to more than 50 current and former Google employees about the company's efforts to catch up to OpenAI, and it argues that the past two years may have reshaped Google more than any other period in its history.

Also, The New Yorker discusses what Donald Trump and Elon Musk's sweeping efforts to dismantle the federal government might mean for NASA.