Hi folks,
In this week’s edition of Forkable, news emerges of another open source-aligned startup reaching unicorn status.
Elsewhere, Apple dropped an open source LLM, while Google open sourced a technology that helps website owners verify users' ages without collecting personal data.
And there’s more….
As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.
Paul
Open issues
Another open source unicorn is coming
I don’t have any concrete data to back this up, but it does seem like there has been a spike in open source-aligned startups raising investor cash these past few months. The latest — reportedly, at least — is LangChain, the company behind the eponymous open source framework used by developers to build advanced applications with large language models (LLMs).
According to several outlets this week, San Francisco-based LangChain is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, making it the latest open source company to hit the much-coveted unicorn status. It follows a few short months after Supabase, which has built an open source alternative to Google’s “backend as a service” platform Firebase, hit unicorn status off the back of a $200 million raise.
A common theme permeates many of these recent fundraises. Even if the startup itself isn’t specifically about AI, more-often-than-not it solves a problem related to AI. In the case of Supabase, the company claimed that vibe-coding (building software with plain-English prompts) was driving demand for its technology — apps, after all, need a backend regardless of how it was built.
LangChain, for its part, addresses a longstanding challenge with LLMs — while powerful on their own, they often struggle with multi-step tasks, tool integration, and accessing up-to-date domain-specific data. LangChain provides a structured framework to connect LLMs with external tools, manage memory, and build complex workflows that chain multiple reasoning steps.
The commercial entity behind LangChain offers managed services and enterprise-grade infrastructure through a product called LangSmith, making it easier for companies to deploy and scale production-grade AI systems.
It’s a classic commercial open source playbook, but with AI at the core.
Read more: AI Startup LangChain Is In Talks To Raise $100 Million [Forbes]
COSS Corner
Speaking the lingo of open source
In this week’s edition of COSS Corner, I checked in with Max Prilutskiy, co-founder of Lingo.dev, a startup building an app localization engine for developers.
I wrote a fairly in-depth piece on Lingo.dev for TechCrunch back in February, just as the company had announced a $4.2 million seed round of funding. More recently, the company introduced an interesting new tool in the form of the Lingo.dev Compiler — middleware that makes any React web app multilingual at build time, without having to alter any of the existing React components. And it’s completely open source.
Read more: Speaking the lingo of open source: Lingo.dev makes React apps multilingual at build-time [Forkable]
Patch notes
Apple’s open source LLM
Apple dropped a novel open source LLM last week, one focused squarely on improving code generation through a diffusion-based approach that iteratively refines its output for better accuracy.
Available on Hugging Face, DiffuCode-7B-cpGRPO — as the model is called — is built atop Qwen2.5‑7B, an open source foundation model from Chinese tech titan Alibaba.
Read more: Apple just released a weirdly interesting coding language model [9to5Mac]
Prove your age without ID
Google has open sourced its internal Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technology, which helps website owners verify users' ages without collecting personal data.
Instead of sharing birth dates or ID cards, the cryptographic ZKP libraries let users prove they meet age requirements without revealing any personal information — offering a privacy-preserving way to comply with age checks. And by making it open source (under an Apache 2.0 license), Google is looking to accelerate adoption.
Read more: Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology to promote privacy in age assurance [Google blog]
Cloud control
Rackspace has launched a fully-managed private cloud service built on OpenStack, designed for businesses running performance-intensive, compliance-sensitive workloads — like financial services, healthcare, and government operations.
The platform offers dedicated infrastructure, security, 24/7 support, and full API access — it’s all about helping companies and public-sector bodies avoid vendor lock-in, and better control their costs.
Read more: Rackspace just launched a new private cloud service – and it’s open source [ITPro]
Mapping a new course
Community-driven maps project CoMaps last week announced the formal launch of the CoMaps mobile app on Android and iOS.
CoMaps promises a number of benefits over the incumbent navigation apps. For starters, it’s open source, free to use, ad-free, and privacy-focused, with a promise to collect no data or never track its users.
It also offers offline search and routing, with a focus on preserving battery life.
I’ve not actually had time to try this out yet, if I’m honest, but I will be doing so this weekend.
Read more: Announcing CoMaps! Navigate with Privacy - Discover more of your journey![CoMaps]
And finally…
Ploopy Knob: A customizable computer controller
Ploopy, a Canadian company known for open source hardware peripherals such as mice, trackballs, and headphones, has launched its latest product.
The Ploopy Knob is a $50 (CAD) 3D-printed, open source desktop control that sports high-resolution scrolling out of the box. It’s like a vertical scroll wheel that runs open source, but with customizable firmware that allows the user to re-program the contraption for horizontal scrolling or for media controls (e.g. volume adjusting).
Personally, I’d buy this just because it’s called Ploopy Knob. But maybe that’s just me.
Read more: Ploopy Knob is a $37 customizable dial for your computer [Liliputing]