We've got some genuinely exciting news to share with the Avalonia community today! We're thrilled to announce that Avalonia has secured a substantial three-year sponsorship. This sponsorship will allow us to accelerate Avalonia's development and benefit everyone significantly.
The sponsor is Devolutions, a Québec-based leader in remote connection management—including RDP and SSH—and Privileged Access Management (PAM), whose cross-platform solutions are built with Avalonia. Their US $3 million commitment provides predictable funding exclusively for community benefit. To put this in perspective, our GitHub sponsors have contributed €15,418 over the past three years, and we're incredibly grateful for that community support, but this single sponsorship from Devolutions dwarfs that by a factor of nearly 200.
David Hervieux, CEO of Devolutions, explains their motivation:
Avalonia gives us the performance and flexibility to build robust, cross-platform PAM solutions without compromise. Supporting its open-source future ensures we can deliver secure, reliable tools—and give back to the ecosystem we rely on.
We extend our sincere thanks to Devolutions for this significant commitment.
What This Means for You – The Community
This funding enables sustained focus on the core framework, documentation, tooling, and community support. All of this remains freely available, meaning every Avalonia user benefits at no cost. Crucially, the sponsorship agreement preserves Avalonia's autonomy and contractually binds us to the MIT licence. Given recent license changes by other projects, we understand why commitments alone may seem insufficient, but abandoning the MIT licence would terminate the sponsorship agreement.
For a long time, we've faced the classic open-source funding gap. While our revenue-generating services have kept us profitable and enabled us to grow the business to a team of 13, commercial work has dictated the team's priorities. This sponsorship completely removes that conflict, allowing us to deliver our roadmap more quickly and benefit every developer who builds with Avalonia. We've always invested heavily in open-source software. Still, it required a constant balancing act between generating enough revenue from commercial activities and not neglecting the foundation on which our entire business is built.
Sustainable Growth for a Lasting Impact
Building Avalonia has always been about creating something truly valuable and enduring. What started as a personal experiment over a decade ago has grown into an enterprise-ready UI framework, but the fundamental challenge remains the same: how do you sustain critical technology that an entire ecosystem depends on?
The conventional answer is venture capital, and we've certainly had offers. However, the statistics tell a sobering story that most people never consider. Around 90% of all startups fail, and even among those that secure VC funding, only 40% are still active after 5 years. The remaining 60% have either failed completely or been acquired, often in fire sales that prioritise investor returns over product continuity.
It's not just bad luck; it's the inevitable result of a fundamental misalignment. VC funding demands exponential growth and exits within a short time frame (typically 3 to 4 years), while the technologies that underpin entire industries need to exist for decades.
Compare this to bootstrapped companies, where 60-70% survive the 5-year mark precisely because they optimise for sustainability from day one. We're living proof of this approach, halfway through our fifth year of trading, and we're profitable with double-digit revenue growth year-over-year, including 69% growth in the first half of 2025 alone. That's the difference between building a business to last versus building one designed to be sold.
This sponsorship demonstrates a more effective approach for open-source projects. When the companies that depend on Avalonia support its sustainability, everyone wins. You get a more reliable, faster-improving framework, and we get the resources to focus on making Avalonia better. We hope more organisations will follow Devolutions' lead in supporting the open-source projects their businesses depend on. If this becomes the norm, the entire .NET ecosystem will benefit from more stable, better-funded projects.
What's Next?
We've been hard at work on planning and initial development of Avalonia v12, which remains on track for Q4 this year, aligning our release cadence with .NET. Among other improvements, v12 includes a significant investment in documentation and developer onboarding materials. We've heard loud and clear that getting started with Avalonia is difficult for developers without extensive WPF experience, and we're committed to fixing this.
To deliver our ambitious roadmap, we're building the strongest team possible, attracting former Xamarin and Microsoft employees who recognise what we've built and want to help us cement Avalonia's leading position in cross-platform .NET UI.
Get Involved
This sponsorship gives us incredible flexibility to focus on what matters most to you. Use this GitHub discussion to share your priorities and suggest features that would make the biggest difference to your projects. Your input will directly shape how we allocate this funding.
Your continued use and advocacy for Avalonia drives our growth, and we're now at over 87 million NuGet downloads and counting. But what we need is your voice in steering Avalonia towards the improvements that matter most to you.
A Bright Future Ahead
Avalonia is truly entering its next chapter with stable backing, a strong commitment to open-source, and a clear vision to become the leading UI framework for .NET.
Thank you all for your ongoing support and belief in Avalonia. We're exceptionally optimistic about what we can achieve together!