Drupal Sponsor Acquia Brings in $68.5 Million of Funding
There is a lot of money backing the open source Drupal content management system (CMS). Acquia, the lead commercial sponsor behind Drupal, today announced its latest round of venture financing. The new E round, worth $30 million, will help the company grow its suite of services and its global footprint for delivering a full-featured CMS.
Acquia has raised $68.5 million in funding since the company was created in 2008. Acquia‘s first round of financing brought in $7 million and included North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The new round adds Investor Growth Capital, Goldman Sachs and Accolade Partners as investors in the open source startup.
“It's a lot of money but we're on a big mission,” Drupal founder Dries Buytaert wrote in a blog post. “We believe that Drupal is uniquely positioned to provide a single, unified platform for content, community and commerce applications.”
Drupal Momentum
Acquia provides commercial services and support that layer on top of the open source Drupal base. The Acquia Cloud offering provides a hosted, fully supported version of Drupal, while Acquia Insight is a Drupal application analysis suite. Acquia also provides professional services around Drupal.
Drupal as a CMS has made significant strides in recent years, particularly with U.S. government customers. Drupal is the engine that powers Whitehouse.gov as well as the FCC's website.
According to Buytaert, Acquia is on track to have 2012 revenue of $44 million. He noted that Acquia has a three-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 250 percent.
“We're set to build a successful, high-margin, highly defensible software company,” Buytaert said. “Expect to see us use the money to accelerate our sales and marketing efforts, to continue our international expansion across Europe and Asia Pacific, to grow each of our product teams, and even to build more products.”
Committed to Open Source Drupal
While Acquia will use its funding to build commercial products and support, the company remains committed to its core open source base. According to Acquia, Drupal adoption is currently growing at a 50 percent year-over-year pace.
The most recent release of Drupal is version 7 , which debuted at the beginning of 2011 with a focus on enterprise deployments. Work has been ongoing since then on Drupal 8 which will push the platform deeper into the enterprise and provide enhanced mobility options.
Drupal 8 is set for release in the summer of 2013.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
