Cartoon By: Gapingvoid.com
Acquia (previous CloudAve coverage), the commercial company behind open source Drupal content management software, announced the completion of Series D round of funding worth $15 Million Dollars. This round was funded by Tenaya Capital along with significant follow up participation from their existing investors, Northbridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Acquia will tap into this round for full throttled sales and marketing with a focus on expanding in Europe.
After Drupal saw tremendous success as an open source project and developing as a powerful content management platform, its original creator Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson co-founded Acquia as a commercial company behind the platform with plans to target the enterprise segment. After 4 rounds of funding totaling $38.5 Million, they have made tremendous progress, especially in the last one year.
The following are some stats from the last one year:
- Revenue growth of 225% year over year
- Customer base grew from 550 to more than 1500 in a eight month period during this time
- Partner ecosystem grew from 220 to 260 partners during the same time with additions like VML, Engine Yard, Alfresco, etc.
- More than 2% of all web sites in the world are built on Drupal
- Some of their customers are Twitter (their recent shiny developer support portal was built on Drupal), Al Jazeera, Mercedes-Benz, Stanford, etc.
Some of the offerings from Acquia are:
- Acquia Network: a subscription service that provides learning and productivity tools, and support for professionals who build and manage Drupal-based websites
- Acquia Commons: a ready-to-use “social as a service” solution to quickly create engaging community websites with more options, better flexibility, and faster time to deployment than any other social software solution on the market
- Acquia Cloud: a Drupal optimized Platform-as-a-Service cloud hosting offering with more than 450 customers and serving more than 4.5 billion http requests per month
- Drupal Gardens: a Drupal-as-a-Service platform that makes building and contributing to Drupal websites easier and fast, with a library of site templates and packaged themes
Acquia’s funding once again confirms the viability of business models around open source software and the success they have on the enterprise market. News like this signify not just the maturity of open source software, it also shows how cloud computing is turning out to be a great monetization strategy for open source software. Pundits have dismissed the relevance of open source in a cloud based world. Contrary to their predictions, open source is emerging as one of the success stories of the cloud based world. I am looking forward to seeing more such stories in the coming years.
Related articles
- Acquia Scores $15M for Social Publishing (xconomy.com)
- Acquia Cloud Gettin’ Git (acquia.com)
- Being an intern at Acquia (acquia.com)
- Acquia Network Partners Accelerate the Value of Owning Drupal Websites – New Relic Announces Real User Monitoring (acquia.com)
- A New Era in Drupal (blogs.sitepoint.com)
