Zend, The PHP Leader, Gets Another $9 Million In Funding

Cupertino, California-based Zend Technologies, which produces products for developing, deploying and managing business PHP applications, announced that it has received $9 million in venture funding led by Greylock Partners (a current investor), with participation from other Zend investors including Azure Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, SAP Ventures, and Walden. We've covered the company's successful funding history before, and its rise alongside the increasing popularity of PHP.

According to the company, Zend now has more than 1,000,000 registered users. One of its central products is Zend Server, a PHP application server. PHP underlies an increasing number of web applications

"Today's enterprises are looking to agile Web and Cloud-based technologies such as PHP to deliver business value better and faster," said Moshe Mor at Greylock Partners, in a statement. "We believe that Zend's leadership position in the PHP space enables the company to drive its solution to deeper adoption across a broad commercial audience in the U.S. and around the globe."

"We are delighted to have the ongoing commitment of our distinguished investors as we take our company and technology to the next level and continue to grow our leadership in the PHP market with the best PHP solutions," said Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder of Zend Technologies, in conjunction with the funding announcement. "Technology cooperation with IBM, Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft and other industry leaders further enables us to deliver Zend PHP solutions broadly into corporate IT departments where simple yet powerful and scalable solutions for rapid application development are in high demand."

As we've covered before, open source languages, development platforms and content management systems are seeing such increased levels of adoption that they are having an impact on everything from enterprise application deployment to the job market. PHP has become a development phenomenon in the new age of web-based applications. With firm roots in open source, it's also evidence of how rapidly open platforms can spread.