Monday, July 20, 2009

Open source consultant Acquia nets $8M financing round

By Galen Moore

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Acquia Inc. has picked up an $8 million second round of equity financing from existing investors, according to regulatory documents posted Friday by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The round brings Acquia’s total funding to at least $15 million.

Existing investors Sigma Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners returned to participate in the second round. A third first-round investor, San Francisco-based O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, did not participate in the second round, according to a company spokeswoman.

The Andover-based open-source consulting shop was co-founded in 2007 by serial entrepreneur Jim Batson and Dries Buytaert, the open-source programmer who founded the Drupal platform for web development in 2001.

The company, which provides Drupal-based IT services for enterprises and developers, now employs 40, and is working on two new releases, according to Buytaert. Acquia Hosting is a cloud-based IT infrastructure system designed around the Drupal LAMP stack. A second project, code-named Acquia Gardens, is designed to provide ready-made web content management for individuals and small organizations.

Buytaert was unavailable for comment on the financing Monday morning.

The Drupal platform encompasses 2,000 professional services companies, and its open-source developer community has contributed 5,000 modules of code that can be integrated into Drupal-based sites, Buytaert said. Acquia aims to be the anchor company at the core of that community — the equivalent to the role of Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) within the Linux open-source community, he said.

Acquia closed its first round of venture financing, worth $7 million, in 2007, from O’Reilly, Sigma and North Bridge. North Bridge’s Michael Skok and Sigma’s John Mandile hold seats on Acquia’s board of directors, according to the SEC documents.