So far, the prospects for open-source companies have been fairly modest, even counting the outsized presence of Mistral (which bills itself as open source) in Europe and Meta’s efforts in the space.
Dealroom says some 12% of AI VC funding last year went to startups building open source AI. “However, there is considerable grey area for what is considered open source or not,” Orla Browne, its head of insights, told me. “For example, xAI is not included in these figures, as while Grok-1 was open source, Grok-2 is currently not. With the inclusion of xAI alone, the percentage would rise to 22%.”