We have been publishing the top trending open-source startups every quarter since Q2 2020, and more than 30,000 developers, founders, and investors have visited the ROSS index to date.
As always, here’s our fresh top 10 for Q2 2026:
🇺🇸 Nous Research (NousResearch/hermes-agent, 205.7K stars, 171.6x growth) is an AI lab developing Hermes, a personal AI agent with persistent memory. Founded in 2023 in Austin, TX. Raised $70M from Paradigm, Robot, North Island, Distributed Global, Delphi, OSS, etc.
🇺🇸 ECC Tools (affaan-m/ECC, 223.5K stars, 159.7x growth) is a library of skills, memory tools, and security scanning for AI coding agents. Founded in 2026 in San Francisco.
🇺🇸 Graphify (safishamsi/graphify, 74.4K stars, 74.4x growth) turns codebases, docs, and diagrams into queryable knowledge graphs for AI coding assistants. Founded in 2025 in San Francisco. Raised $0.5M from Y Combinator.
🇨🇳 Nexu (nexu-io/open-design, 72.9K stars, 72.9x growth) builds Open Design, a desktop AI agent that prototypes websites, mobile apps, and slides. Founded in 2024 in China. Raised an undisclosed amount from MindWorks.
🇺🇸 EgonexAI (Egonex-AI/Understand-Anything, 69.2K stars, 61.6x growth) builds Understand Anything, a plugin that maps a codebase into a visual knowledge graph. Founded in 2026 in Dover, DE.
🇦🇪 World Monitor (koala73/worldmonitor, 60.9K stars, 54.0x growth) is a real-time dashboard that aggregates news and geopolitical events with AI. Founded in 2026 in Abu Dhabi.
🇺🇸 Headroom (headroomlabs-ai/headroom, 53.9K stars, 53.1x growth) compresses tool outputs, logs, and RAG data to cut LLM token costs. Founded in 2026 in Fremont, CA.
🇫🇷 rtk (rtk-ai/rtk, 67.0K stars, 50.9x growth) is a CLI proxy that reduces LLM token consumption on common dev commands. Founded in 2026 in Lyon.
🇭🇰 Multica (multica-ai/multica, 38.5K stars, 38.5x growth) is a platform for assigning tasks to AI coding agents and tracking their progress. Founded in 2026 in Hong Kong.
🇺🇸 TinyHumans (tinyhumansai/openhuman, 33.9K stars, 33.9x growth) builds OpenHuman, a local-first desktop AI agent with persistent memory across 100+ connected services. Founded in 2025 in San Francisco.
Get more data about other startups from the last quarter at ROSS Index Q2 2026.
The index evolves with the support of its community, and in Q1 2026, we slightly tweaked our methodology. In a nutshell, our approach remains simple:
Monitor all GitHub repos with 1,000+ stars
Calculate the growth of stars during the target "sliding window" period
Select repos that are only associated with early-stage startups
Highlight the top 20 trending open-source startups by their GitHub star growth
There's no magic open metric representing the quality of tech companies. Our star growth-based approach highlights noteworthy early-stage startups leveraging open source that have been on developers' minds in the last quarter.
Since its launch in Q2 2020, all quarterly indexes are published on our website. You can easily contact us with your ideas on how to improve the index. Also, if you’re a lucky participant in the ROSS index’s top 20, feel free to let others know about this by adding a special badge on your GitHub repo or to your website.
Besides the ROSS index, we maintain our own open source repo: awesome list of open-source alternatives to established SaaS products. It already has 19,000+ stars and 100+ contributors. Join them or just give it a star 😊
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.