By April 29, 2026, five frontier-class open-weight LLMs had shipped within thirty days of each other: Meta's Llama 4 (Scout and Maverick), Alibaba's Qwen 3.5, DeepSeek V4 (Pro and Flash), Google's Gemma 4, and Mistral Medium 3.5. Almost every one of them is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts — DeepSeek V4-Pro at 1.6T total parameters with 49B active, Llama 4 Maverick at 400B/17B, Qwen 3.5 at 397B/17B, Mistral Large 3 at 675B/41B. The benchmark gap between open and closed is no longer the story; the licensing fragmentation is.
Apache 2.0 has effectively won the permissive license war among labs that want enterprise adoption. Gemma 4, Qwen 3.5, Mistral Large 3, and Yi all ship under it. DeepSeek V4 ships MIT, which is broader still. Llama 4 retains the Meta community license with use-based restrictions, which is why some commercial deployers prefer the Apache cohort even when Llama benchmarks higher on Llama 4 Maverick's 85.5% MMLU.
The 20 companies we track here account for roughly $8.3B in disclosed funding. Mistral AI ($6.34B cumulative including a recent debt facility, $13.8B post-money, Paris) is the headline European bet. Hugging Face ($470M Series D, $4.5B) is the registry every other lab depends on — Llama 4, Qwen 3.5, DeepSeek V4, Gemma 4, and Mistral Large 3 all distribute through the Hub. Liquid AI ($300M Series B) ships its LFM family as openly licensed checkpoints aimed at on-device deployment. Physical Intelligence ($735M Series B at $2.7B) extends the open ethos into robotics foundation models. Imbue ($232M Series B at $1B) builds open-research coding agents. Qdrant ($85M Series B, Berlin), LanceDB ($41.5M Series A, $155M), and Chroma ($20.3M seed at $75M) anchor the open-core retrieval layer that every RAG stack imports.
On the smaller end, Cline ($4M seed at $110M) is the open-source coding agent now scoring competitively against Cursor on Aider Polyglot when paired with GLM-5 or DeepSeek V3.2-Speciale. OpenCode runs on zero raised. Aider, Tabby, Refact.ai (Netherlands), and Kilo Code fill out the self-hosted developer-tooling tier. Falcon LLM out of TII Abu Dhabi and Kyutai in Paris are publicly funded open labs working outside the Mistral and Hugging Face axis.
Twelve of twenty companies are US-headquartered; the rest split across France (Mistral, Kyutai), Germany (Qdrant), Netherlands (Refact.ai), China (Baichuan), and the UAE (Falcon). EU and Gulf sovereigns are actively funding open-weight alternatives so critical workloads do not depend on US APIs, with US GPU export controls and the EU AI Act's general-purpose thresholds shaping the next wave of releases. Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, General Catalyst, and Sequoia lead deal count, often alongside Nvidia and the major clouds.