Quira was an AI-powered platform for open source bounties. We embarked on a mission to change the way developers learn, create, and make money from their open source contributions.

We launched in 2020, when developer demand was at historic highs and it wasn’t yet clear how soon AI would be able to write software. Quira began with three main goals:

1. Help developers build reputation in open source and use their contributions to demonstrate their skills — a new kind of data-driven CV.
2. Help companies find talent systematically and reduce sourcing friction — even making technical interviews unnecessary when enough contribution data is available.
3. Make open source more sustainable by introducing reputation and monetary incentives, and gamifying contributions — addressing the maintainer problem through developer reputation.

We explored a lot of bold ideas:

• DevRank: a reputation system for developers inspired by PageRank, applied to the GitHub open source graph.
• Contributor Matching: creating embeddings of issues, pull requests, and code to match developers with projects.
• A taxonomy of open source: using machine learning to map and classify the OSS ecosystem into topics.
• The first NFT for commits: allowing developers to mint NFTs of their commits and sell them to collectors.
• Recommendation engines for contributions: indexing over 100,000 open source projects and helping developers find open issues that match their skillsets.
• A bounty system for GitHub issues: enabling maintainers to set a bounty on their open GitHub issues and find contributors to solve them.
• Creator Quests: helping OSS organisations run fully-managed hackathons without friction.

Although not all of these experiments stuck, they pushed us — and the space — forward in creative ways.

Quira is closing because AIs can code now many of our core assumptions are no longer relevant and we weren’t able to find a path that felt both true to our product and sustainable for our commercial trajectory. We still believe there could be a version of Quira that thrives in an AI-native, agentic era, but it isn’t something we can reach from where we are today.

Thanks to users, contributors, customers, team, and investors - this journey was meaningful because of the people we had the privilege to serve, collaborate with, and dream alongside.

If you were a Quira user, you’ll have until September 1, 2025 to download your data. After that date, all user data will be permanently deleted. Any remaining bounty payments will be sent via Tremendous to the email address on file. If you have a positive outstanding balance, please watch for an email from tremendous.com.

It’s unlikely. The world we were building for shifted quickly, and while some version of Quira could make sense in the future, we don’t believe the problems we set out to solve are as relevant today. Quira itself may not return — but we’ll never rule out the possibility of trying again someday.