Open Source Startup Podcast

This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Dr. Felipe Huici , CEO of Unikraft - the compute layer for sandboxes, AI agents, or any workload with VM-grade isolation. Their open source, also called unikraft , has 4K stars on GitHub and provides a next-generation cloud native kernel. This episode explores how Unikraft is building infrastructure for th...

This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with James Bayer , Chief Product Officer at software development platform Flox . Flox's open source, also called flox , provides a software environment platform powered by package manager Nix . In this episode, James shares lessons from his career across Cloud Foundry, Pivotal, and HashiCorp, where he helpe...

This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Zohar Einy the Co-Founder of agentic SDLC platform Port . They have a few open source projects including ocean which allows third-party systems to integrate with their developer portal. Port is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for the agentic era, evolving the traditional internal developer p...

The latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Neal Swaelens and Oleks Yaremchuk , 2 of the Co-Founders of runtime agent security company Manifold Security . Manifold recently released Manifest , their open-access, graph-based supply chain intelligence tool for users to scan skills and plugins to uncover any potential supply chain risks. In this...

The latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Batuhan Taskaya , the founding engineer and current Head of Engineering at generative media cloud Fal . Fal is a developer platform that allows builders to develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. This episode explores how a small, highly technical team carved out a u...

In our latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Pedram Amini , the creator of open source platform Maestro which allows users to run fleets of AI coding agents autonomously for long periods of time. Their project has 3K stars on GitHub. The episode explores how Maestro's multi-agent system overcame a key limitation in generative AI: context overload. After j...

In our latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Magnus Müller , the Co-Founder & CEO of Browser Use - the platform that makes web agents come to life. Their open source, browser-use , has almost 80K stars on GitHub and is widely adopted. This episode dives into the unexpected rise of an open-source browser automation project that took off during Y Combinator...

In our latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Catherine Jue , Co-Founder and CEO of browser infrastructure company Kernel . Their open source images acts as a browsers-as-a-service for automations and web agents. In this episode, we break down what Kernel is building today and why browser infrastructure has quietly become one of the most important layers for A...

In our latest episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Robert Brennan , Co-Founder & CEO of OpenHands - the open platform for cloud coding agents. Their open source project, also called OpenHands , has 67K starts on GitHub and provides a software agent SDK, CLI, and local GUI. They also have OpenHands cloud - their paid, hosted version of the OpenHands GUI. This episode traces the rise of Ope...

In our latest episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Julien Mangeard , Co-Founder of open source backup platform Plakar . Plakar's open source, also called plakar , has 1.5K stars on GitHub and provides a backup solution powered by open source, immutable data store Kloset. The podcast discusses why data backup remains a critical but unsolved problem, especially as the number of data sources has...

In our latest episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Zarko Milosevic (CTO) & Arianne Flemming (COO) of Informal Systems . They've built a protocol design & cross-chain infrastructure platform to foster trust in software and money. This episode explores how open source infrastructure and security drive company-building in high-stakes financial software. Using Malachite - a consensus...

In our latest episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Jon Morehouse , founder and CEO of infrastructure company Nuon which enables Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) for everyone. This is an exclusive podcast episode with Jon digging into their decision to open source Nuon! The episode discusses the industry’s growing shift toward Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), where SaaS products run directly inside...

In our latest episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Yoni Michael and Kostas Pardalis , Co-Founders of Typedef . Both have deep backgrounds in data infrastructure (Starburst, Tecton, etc.) and, after meeting through a "blind date" at Blue Bottle Coffee, decided to team up to address the growing brittleness of large-scale data pipelines - issues made worse by the rise of AI. They e...

In our latest episode, Robby and Tim talk with Will McGugan , creator of the Rich and Textual open source projects and founder of Textualize and Toad (not yet released), about the challenges of turning beloved open-source projects into real businesses. Despite Rich and Textual's huge adoption in the Python community, he says he waited too long to monetize, focused too much on technical perfect...

In this episode, we sit down with Paul Klein IV , Founder & CEO of Browserbase , to explore how his team is redefining the foundation of AI-driven browser automation . Browserbase provides the web browser infrastructure for AI agents and apps, and its open-source SDK, Stagehand , lets developers write automations using natural language - adapting seamlessly as websites evolve. Paul shares his...

This episode dives into why code quality still matters in the age of AI , and why English - no matter how good models get - won’t replace programming . Our guest is Co-Founder of Boundary , Vaibhav Gupta , and he shares the journey behind BAML , a new programming language to write and manage AI logic. After 12 pivots and 3.5 years, the team realized something simple but powerful: AI tools were evo...

In the episode, we sat down with ClickHouse Co-Founder Yury Izrailevsky to unpack how one of the fastest open-source databases in the world became the analytics engine of choice for 2,000 customers including Harvey, Canva, HP, and Supabase. From its Yandex origins to powering AI observability, Yury shares how ClickHouse balances open-source roots, cloud innovation, and a remote-first culture movin...

Chang She is Co-Founder & CEO of LanceDB , the multimodal lakehouse platform. Their open source data format lance has over 5K stars on GitHub and is a modern columnar data format for ML and LLMs implemented in Rust. LanceDB has raised $41M from investors including Theory Ventures, CRV, and Essence VC. In this episode, we dig into: Early focus: autonomous vehicles; solved real-time analysis lim...

Ryan Djurovich is the Founder & CEO of Nadrama , the open source infrastructure automation platform that deploys containers instantly. In this episode, we dig into: Kubernetes challenges that still exist today – setup and operations are notoriously hard and complex. What great developer experience means to him – focused on making deployments super simple by streamlining infrastructure and comm...

Morgante Pell is the Founder of Grit , the developer tool that puts software maintenance on autopilot and was acquired by Honeycomb in April 2025. In this episode, we dig into: The Grit product and how LLMs have made software maintenance much more efficient Launching GritQL - Grit's embedded query language for searching and transforming code Their early focus on the JavaScript community The motiva...

Emma Burrows is Co-Founder & CTO of Portia AI , the platform to build AI agents in regulated environments. Their open source Python SDK provides a developer framework for predictable and stateful agentic workflows. Portia AI has raised around $5M from investors including General Catalyst and First Minute Capital. In this episode, we dig into: Why they built an end-to-end platform from agent pl...

Alan Braithwaite is Co-Founder & CTO of RunReveal , the security data platform with real-time monitoring, built-in detections, and AI-powered investigations. Today, they manage and analyze security logs for teams at Harvey, ClickHouse, Cloudflare, and Temporal. RunReveal has multiple open source projects including event stream processing library kawa and query language pql . RunReveal has rais...

Vasek Mlejnsky is Co-Founder & CEO of E2B , the open-source runtime for executing AI-generated code in secure cloud sandboxes. Essentially, they give AI agents cloud computers. Their open source repos, particularly e2b which has 9K GitHub stars, have been widely adopted to help securely run AI-generated code. E2B has raised $12M from investors including Decibel and Sunflower. In this episode,...

Roman Gershman is Co-Founder & CTO of Dragonfly , the drop-in Redis replacement for heavy data workloads that has significant performance, cost, and scale benefits. Their open source dragonflydb has 28K stars on GitHub. Dragonfly has raised $21M from investors including Quiet Capital and Redpoint. In this episode, we dig into: The challenges with Redis The users that have really benefitted fro...

Lukas Schulte is Co-Founder & CEO of SDF Labs , the developer platform that scales SQL understanding across organizations, which was recently acquired by data transformation unicorn dbt Labs . In this episode, he's joined by Anders Swanson , Senior Developer Experience Advocate at dbt, to discuss the acquisition and future of data engineering. In this episode, we dig into: How the acquisition...