Today is another day in the sun for open source! HashiCorp has announced an enormous $100 Million round on a unicorn valuation of $1.9 Billion.

HashiCorp launched in 2012, which we covered around the same time with founder and creator Mitchell Hashimoto, and again a year later shortly after officially forming HashiCorp with Armon Dadgar.

Ron Miller of TechCrunch included this pull-quote to give context to HashiCorp’s roots.

After graduating and getting jobs, Hashimoto and Dadgar reunited in 2012 and launched HashiCorp. They decided to break their big problem down into smaller, more manageable pieces and eventually built the five open source tools currently on offer. In fact, they found as they developed each one, the community let them know about adjacent problems and they layered on each new tool to address a different need.

Over the years, HashiCorp has been in our newsfeed and on our podcasts regularly — so dig into the archives while we make plans to sync up with Mitchell on the future plans of HashiCorp.

That’s a lot of Billions attached to a company built on the back of open source Linux. To give a quick reminder, we JUST DID A SHOW with special guest Joseph Jacks titled “Venture capital meets commercial OSS” and, of course, Red Hat was mentioned several times. They’re also on the $100M+ revenue commercial open source software company index we talked about.

We’ll dig into this and keep you updated on this breaking news that’s just days off the heels of Microsoft’s official acquisition announcement of GitHub. Needless to say, this has been a BIG WEEK for commercial open source software companies.

Is this really a chance to get $10,000 in equity-free funding just for completing a free online course? Seems there’s also $50,000 in credits to a variety of other services too.

Startup School is a free, 10-week, online course. It’s designed for any startup founder who would like to get help through the earliest, most difficult challenges of starting a company. The course will begin on August 27, 2018 and applications are now open at StartupSchool.org.

Andrew Ng shared his plans for his newly created AI Fund — with investments including NEA, Sequoia, Greylock Partners, SoftBank Group, and others.

Andrew Ng:

I am excited to announce the formation of the AI Fund. We have raised $175 million, and will be sequentially initiating new businesses that use AI to improve human life.

In the early days of electricity, much of the innovation centered around slightly different improvements in lighting. While this was an important foundation, the really transformative applications, in which electric power spurred massive redesigns in multiple industries, took longer to be grasped. AI is the new electricity, and is at a similar inflection point.

Given Andrew Ng’s prominence and success in bringing AI to industry, and his partnership with some of the world’s premier technology investment firms, this announcement may well signal the next wave of capitalization for AI-oriented startups.