Tech
A VC and some big-name programmers are trying to solve open source’s funding problem, permanently
A group of notable open source programmers are joining with a VC investor to launch a nonprofit called the Open Source Endowment in hopes of permanently solving the perennial issue with developing open source software: funding.
Backers of the Open Source Endowment include Thomas Dohmke (the former GitHub CEO who raised a record $60 million for his dev tool startup Entire); Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, which sold to IBM for $6.4 billion last year); Supabase founder and CEO Paul Copplestone; an NGINX co-founder; the creators of Vue.js and cURL; plus execs from Elastic, Spotify, and others. All told, the project has over 50 donors so far.
The nonprofit, which just achieved formal 501(c)(3) status, has currently raised more than $750,000 in commitments. But if things go according to the plan of its founder, Konstantin Vinogradov, it will have $100 million in assets within seven years.
Vinogradov is a venture investor specializing in open source, AI, and infrastructure software, and was previously a general partner at Runa Capital. As such, he has “some experience with university endowments,” which are some of the largest investors in venture capital funds, he told TechCrunch.
Vinogradov says as he scoured the world for open source projects, one complaint kept popping up: “There is no source of sustainable funding for open source maintainers. And that’s a really big problem.” (“Maintainer” refers to the developers who work on open source projects, such as debugging, choosing and verifying features submitted by the community, or programming new features themselves.)
The endowment will support projects based on criteria such as its number of users, or how many other projects rely on that specific software to operate. It will also choose projects that are not already well-supported by grants, donations, or umbrella organizations such as Linux’s Alpha-Omega. Vinogradov has already assembled a board for the nonprofit.
Cash strapped, burned out
The lack of money in open source is hardly new. Open source software is typically given away, and since the community often contributes time and efforts freely, up to 86% of open source developers are not paid for their work.
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This isn’t much of a problem for hobbyists or for professional developers paid by their companies to maintain projects, but such a system stands on shaky ground. Open source software is the bedrock upon which the internet stands, and virtually every large company uses open source tools in some way. In fact, open source software accounts for up to 55% of the tech stack in organizations, and is present in everything from databases to operating systems.
While it is certainly possible for open source developers to commercialize their free projects to gain wealth beyond their wildest dreams, the odds, to misquote the Hunger Games, are not in their favor.
There is, and has been for decades, a core of developers who volunteer their time and efforts for free to manage popular, important, and critical projects. And many of them are burned out.
This issue came into the public’s consciousness briefly in 2014, with the OpenSSL Heartbleed disaster, where a bug was found in an open source security project, used by most of the internet, that was maintained by a single developer.
There have been many attempts to fix the funding situation over the years. Some projects take donations from corporate sponsors. For instance, The Linux Foundation, which brought in about $300 million last year largely from corporate sponsors, doles out grants to select projects through its Alpha-Omega Project. In 2025, Alpha-Omega issued $5.8 million to 14 projects, it said.
Some projects take donations directly from corporate donors. In January, for instance, Anthropic donated $1.5 million to the Python Software Foundation. While the Foundation said it was thrilled to have that cash, Anthropic itself raised $30 billion this month. Such a donation is couch-change to the AI lab.
Still, not every developer wants to take corporate donations, as there are worries of granting too much influence to donor companies. For instance, there was a big hubbub last year in the Ruby community surrounding some long-time maintainers leaving and its big sponsor Shopify, The Register reported.
The Open Source Endowment hopes to support projects while displacing such risks.
“The only way to support open source sustainably is private funds,” says Vinogradov.
Why hasn’t an endowment been tried before? Endowments require patience, Vinogradov says. They invest many of their assets, spending only a fraction of their income in any given year, and require years or even decades to grow to a meaningful size.
But if done right, that patience will result in an independent fund that could support critical open source projects forever.
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
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Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
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While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
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Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
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