OpenSauced raises 3.5 million from Boldstart, GitHub and more

OpenSauced is strategically positioned for what I call generational shift happening in open source right now. Open source is no longer just nights and weekends, but rather critical pieces of our infrastructure and data pipelines. Not to mention the rate at which AI is accelerating, the industry is now more concerned than ever about trust, safety, and compliance in open source.

I am excited to announce a round of funding led by boldstart ventures with participation from the GitHub Fund, Precursor Ventures, basecase capital, Nat Friedman, Guillermo Rauch, Matt Biilmann, Chris Bach, Tom Preston-Werner. Very Special thanks to Ellen Chisa, who has not only become our day-one partner, but became my advocate for the OpenSauced vision even before our first check.

Why now?

I had the privilege of working at GitHub supporting the largest open source projects by building relationships with the maintainers and getting their feature requests in the GitHub public roadmap. I remember sitting in a meeting with members from a Kubernetes SIG requesting access to more data. They built their own dashboard for the consumption of actionable devstats. Kubnernetes was not an overnight success, as I learned from Brendan Burns and Kelsey Hightower; instead it was a group of data-driven contributors that could identify trends in their adoption.

Here is a trend I see

pgvector is single-handedly adding multiples to the valuations of database startups, but who is actually maintaining? Looking at the last 6 months, 60% of the contributions that landed on main have come from the co-founder of Neon database.

oss.fyi/pgvector/pgvector

We built OpenSauced to make it easier to find insightful trends like these, but our next mission it to make them even more discoverable and actionable with AI

Introducing StarSearch

Back in the '90s, I sat on my grandma's couch watching the show with the same name discover Beyoncé before she was famous.

StarSearch comes from that same idea of discovering developers using clear trends and inflection points in open-source contributions while sitting on your grandma's couch. I shared a brief demo on stage at React Miami last month as a response to a tweet from Adam Wathan, who was looking to connect to Tailwind devs with a passion for Rust performance. Below is a brief demo of it, which shares a list of developers who met Adams's criteria.

Our secret sauce on how we do this using vLLMs is shared in a recent blog post from our John McBride, and excited to open sourcing more of this journey.

So far our customers are really excited about what StarSearch unlocks for them.

“I'm loving how the @saucedopen team are using tons of unstructured GitHub data and helping orgs to start to unveil the nuances within open-source communities. And [how OpenSauced helps to] discover developers using clear trends and inflection points via their open-source contributions.”

[Dees, Mozilla Ventures]

"This is such a fantastic idea and execution. Being able to discover open-source projects and contributors is a potential game changer. This would be super useful for open source startups looking to find contributors, or partnerships in the OSS community. Really super stuff. Well done!”

[Jian, Snaplet]

What’s Next? We are now actively having conversations with Startups and Enterprises about how we can solve the pain point of actionable insights powered by this groundbreaking AI innovation.

If you are interested in seeing a demo on what we are working on cal.com/opensauced

Stay Saucy.