Acquia Gets $8 Million in Second Round Financing

We've written about Acquia a number of times. Co-founded by Dries Buytaert, the founder of the Drupal content management system (which OStatic is based on), Acquia provides commercial support and services for Drupal. Now, the company has received an $8 million second round of venture financing from two of three of its existing investors, according to regulatory documents posted by the Securities and Exchange Commission. With Drupal growing like wildfire, and becoming especially popular with publishers seeking more economical content management, Acquia's total of $15 million of venture funding has it well positioned for growth.

According to this report, existing investors Sigma Partners and North Bridge Partners participated in the second round financing for Acquia, but not O'Reilly Alphatech Ventures, which was one of the first round investors. Acquia has a new CEO, Tom Erickson, who joined the company in March.

The company, along with Cloudera, which provides commercial support for Hadoop, and Eucalyptus Sytems, which provides support and services for the Eucalyptus cloud computing platform, is an example of how startup companies are building Red Hat-like service and support businesses around popular open source applications and platforms. Especially as open source adoption in enterprises increases, we'll probably see other companies following this business model, and the venture capital community appears to understand it well.

For more on Acquia's subscription-based Drupal support, see this story.