$40m is the total Spanish OSS Exit Market.

This week was "Barcelona Open Tech Week 2026". We went there excited about the prospect of seeing a more collaborative Europe.

Then, during the second talk, someone floated a poignant question:

Is there EU or Spanish planned support for Open Source Software?

No answer.

They did say something along the lines "I'm not the right person for that question, but we support hackathons/education and help companies provide AI services responsibly. I can put you in contact with the BCN supercomputing center". Not bad, but not truly an answer.

So we deep dived into the topic, and saw these numbers on software:

• $132.6Bn, US federal, state and local governments spent in 2025.
• €665.9Mn Spanish government reported spent on software licences.
• £21bn UK spent on software in 2023, £1.9bn just on Microsoft software licences.
• 0.5% of total German federal spending on OSS and related services in 2023.
• ~83% of cloud and software spend in the EU goes to US firms.

After that, we screened over 100 top Spanish companies, and identified the 44 open source/core. None ever reached a unicorn valuation or exit. 9 moved to the US. We then looked into US, UK & EU (wo ES):

• 15 OSS unicorns in EU (out of 45), and
• 27 in the US (out of 44)

(sources dataset & Developer-First Europe).

Is there a story behind it?

First: The 3 Spanish (known) exits

Kurento sold for $8.5M (VentureBeat).
Argilla sold for $10M (PYMNTS).
Nuclia sold for $21.4M (Progress 10-K).

That's it, in the whole history of the country.

It's true Hermez was acquired by Polygon for MATIC tokens ($250M, CoinDesk). But it's actually a separate kind of transfer.
The surprising bit was that the EU is $30.4B for 8 companies. That's a drastic difference.

The smallest disclosed exit in the US, Ansible, was for $126.3M (Red Hat 10-Q).

One configuration-management tool from Durham, NC, sold for three times every historic Spanish exit combined.

Second: Fly away

Of those 44 Spanish OSS projects, 9 moved countries: AlienVault, CARTO, Bitnami, Wazuh, Okteto, Prowler, VyOS, Chainloop, Teambox. They registered in the US. Those 9 are responsible for raising over 66% of the $372M disclosed across all.

Can you guess why? Maybe these examples will help:

AlienVault built OSSIM in Madrid, raised $116M and moved to San Mateo. AT&T bought it in 2018 at a price nobody disclosed (Novobrief, TechCrunch).

Bitnami started in Sevilla, raised $1.1M, and moved to San Francisco. Sold to VMware in 2019.

Wazuh moved to Campbell, California. It now runs cash positive (Forbes).

Similar stories for CARTO, Prowler, Okteto, Chainloop, VyOS & Teambox.

Each of them did the right thing: built a community, incorporated in Delaware, sell to US. That's the playbook, Spain is a country that exports its best open source companies.

Before you blame it on them

Remember the poignant question above: Is there planned support for Open Source?

The answer was in the line of 'I don't know, you need to talk with someone else'. In fact, they change topics to talk about business viability, and how they are sponsoring hackathons.

The reality is there's no special framework for Open Source companies in Spain, or the EU. That summed up with other common challenges with other organizations, make it so money follows the path of least resistance.

What do you mean about "money"?

Third: Talent v Money

Between 2020 to 2025, these are the numbers per person invested in all ventures:
Spain - $256
Germany - $675,
France - $736,
UK - $1,666,
US - $4,309
(State of European Tech, PitchBook-NVCA).

The interesting thing is that as a share of GDP, Spain is the one investing the least (20%), of what others do (State of European Tech). So technically, if Spain followed a similar investment strategy, that number would be 5x. Hence, Spanish capital usually doesn't lead.

In fact, ROSS Index lists the 20 fastest-growing open source startups every quarter. From 2020 Q2 to 2026 Q3, 26 quarters: 195 US companies, 25 from the UK, 20 German, 17 French, 2 Spanish. Penpot and Frontity. Frontity sold in 2021. But that's not the example, the example is Penpot:

Penpot and PostHog both sell a product developers can self-host. Penpot has more stars (61k v 40k). But, PostHog was founded in the UK, has raised $194M with a $1.4B valuation (PostHog). While the company behind Penpot, raised only $22.6M before a down round. (SETT, CB Insights). The Spanish project has more stars with a 1/8th of investment.

The talent is there

Spain has 2.57M GitHub developers, 16th in the world, and grew 24% in 2024.
It's the fastest rate in the EU (Innovation Graph, Octoverse). At the same time, Spain spends 1.50% of GDP on R&D, vs 2.26% across the EU (Eurostat).

That's why so many people hire here. The talent is great!

The one thing

Companies know (artificial) intelligence needs to be owned, not rented. And the trend with OSS in the US is growing rapidly. Why?

They are commoditizing their complements, the incumbents. Even though OSS is not truly free to build, maintain or deploy, it does effectively commoditize dependencies. This means for companies, governments and investment firms, with vested interests in multiple companies, it's a powerful tool to disrupt others. It disarms certain competitive advantages.

You don't win the race, you disarm it.

Next time you are evaluating the budget, consider how much shorter the discussion with your providers would be if you had applied this strategy.

References

All data below

Sources: the full dataset.
The research, the page and the charts were made by an agent swarm, ours, running from here: agent-swarm.dev.

Know a Spanish open source company we missed? Send it.

We will screen it against the same rules and add it to the table.

Software spend sources:

• $132.6Bn: BEA via FRED (Y056RC1A027NBEA)
• €665.9Mn: DGRCC Memoria 2025, Table T12
• £21bn: DSIT State of digital government review, £1.9bn: Hansard written answer UIN 65920
• 0.5%: Linux Foundation World of Open Source: EU Spotlight 2025
• ~83%: Asterès for CIGREF, April 2025