Medusa

Welcome to Open Pioneers #25 - your weekly update from the forefront of open source.

Today, we talk about:

• Medusa, an open source commerce platform

• New open source projects, including gptpdf, inwind, and StableFace

• $206M in new funding for open source companies

Since last week, we have welcomed 28 new Open Pioneers. 👋 If you like this week's post, it would make my day if you would share it with a friend or colleague.

🔍 Spotlight: Medusa, an open source commerce platform

Medusa is an open-source headless commerce platform designed to empower developers to build highly customized and flexible ecommerce solutions. With its headless architecture, Medusa allows developers to create unique and tailored frontends while managing all ecommerce functionalities through a powerful backend.

The platform is known for its modularity and extensibility, providing a robust foundation that can be easily customized to meet specific business needs. This includes a range of plugins for essential ecommerce features such as payments, shipping, and inventory management. Medusa prioritizes a developer-friendly approach, offering comprehensive documentation, a rich set of APIs, and a vibrant community for support.

Medusa’s founders previously worked in the ecommerce industry and experienced the limitations of existing commerce platforms. They recognized a gap in the market for a solution that offered greater flexibility and control to developers. Motivated by this challenge, they set out to create Medusa, aiming to provide an open-source alternative to platforms like Shopify that is both powerful and adaptable.

Since its inception, Medusa has grown rapidly, gaining traction among developers and businesses. With over 23k GitHub stars, it’s the biggest open source project in the commerce space.

Website | GitHub

🔥 New open source projects started last week

💰 Open source funding - $206M

• Sentient, working on community-driven open AGI, closes $85M seed round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Link

• TIER IV, building open source software for autonomous driving, announced their $54M Series B extension. Link

• Onehouse, building a data lakehouse built on top of Apache Hudl, raised $35M. Link

• SurrealDB, a multi-model database, announced their $20M Series A. Link

• Restate, a workflows-as-code platform, announced their $7M Seed. Link

• Daytona, maker of open source developer environment management tools, raises $5M. Link

🔭 Open source social monitor

📚 More open source content

• Podcast episode with database legend Michael Stonebraker Link

• Is banking going open source? Link

• SAP releases Open Source Manifesto Link

• How Does the Linux Foundation Work and What Does it Do? Link

• Some Open Source Software Licences are Only ‘Open-ish,’ Says Thoughtworks Link

Until next week,

Jonathan (@jonathimer)