Something weird is happening in tech right now that isn’t getting as much airtime as I expected.
Big tech is acquiring a lot of open-source startups.
Vercel bought BetterAuth
Supabase bought Turso
Cloudflare bought Deno (and killed most of it!)
And many other curious purchases. All for startups with next-to-no revenue and for undisclosed sums.
I suspect the valuation secrecy is less about how desperate the seller was and more about not revealing how motivated the buyer was.
But what’s really interesting is the trend:
Strategic infrastructure is worth more right now than standalone revenue.
Sure, developer adoption is a distribution advantage.
Bun has almost 100k stars on GitHub. BetterAuth 30k. But that’s not the main driver.
AI makes developer infrastructure strategically critical. And almost all of the really important stuff is open source.
Anthropic didn't need Bun to generate significant subscription revenue. It needed Bun to help Claude Code run faster and more reliably. The Bun team described it: if Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks.
This is about acquiring runtimes, build systems, development tools, and identity infrastructure because these are the essential components of agent-driven software development.
The deals involve projects with significant technical credibility, adoption, or exceptionally specialized teams. Because the infrastructure layer is the hardest part to build right!
Even for frontier models, it's often cheaper to buy these capabilities than to build them.
It's also hard to trust infra if it's proprietary. So, to be a force in tech in years to come, it's all open-source, baby!
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