New Open Source Startups Emerge After Acquisition, IPO Flurry

After a flurry of mega-acquisitions and initial public offerings of open source companies, a new batch of entrepreneurs are trying their hands at startups based on free software projects.

Former engineers from Uber and Airbnb who created tools that the companies later released as open source software—known as M3 and Apache Superset, respectively—have each recently founded startups based on one of those projects, The Information has learned. A third new startup based on open source software called Snorkel, which seeks to automate the process of labeling data in artificial intelligence applications, was incorporated earlier this year by at least one of the Stanford University researchers who helped create the original software.