Acquia to receive majority investment from Vista Equity Partners

Today, we announced that Acquia has agreed to receive a substantial majority investment from Vista Equity Partners. This means that Acquia has a new investor that owns more than 50 percent of the company, and who is invested in our future success. Attracting a well-known partner like Vista is a tremendous validation of what we have been able to achieve. I'm incredibly proud of that, as so many Acquians worked so hard to get to this milestone.

Our mission remains the same

Our mission at Acquia is to help our customers and partners build amazing digital experiences by offering them the best digital experience platform.

This mission to build a digital experience platform is a giant one. Vista specializes in growing software companies, for example, by providing capital to do acquisitions. The Vista ecosystem consists of more than 60 companies and more than 70,000 employees globally. By partnering with Vista and leveraging their scale, network and expertise, we can greatly accelerate our mission and our ability to compete in the market.

For years, people have rumored about Acquia going public. It still is a great option for Acquia, but I'm also happy that we stay a private and independent company for the foreseeable future.

We will continue to direct all of our energy to what we have done for so long: provide our customers and partners with leading solutions to build, operate and optimize digital experiences. We have a lot of work to do to help more businesses see and understand the power of Open Source, cloud delivery and data-driven customer experiences.

We'll keep giving back to Open Source

This investment should be great news for the Drupal and Mautic communities as we'll have the right resources to compete against other solutions, and our deep commitment to Drupal, Mautic and Open Source will be unchanged. In fact, we will continue to increase our current level of investment in Open Source as we grow our business.

In talking with Vista, who has a long history of promoting diversity and equality and giving back to its communities, we will jointly invest even more in Drupal and Mautic. We will:

• Improve the “learnability of Drupal” to help us attract less technical and more diverse people to Drupal.
• Sponsor more Drupal and Mautic community events and meetups.
• Increase the amount of Open Source code we contribute.
• Fund initiatives to improve diversity in Drupal and Mautic; to enable people from underrepresented groups to contribute, attend community events, and more.

We will provide more details soon.

I continue in my role

I've been at Acquia for 12 years, most of my professional career.

During that time, I've been focused on making Acquia a special company, with a unique innovation and delivery model, all optimized for a new world. A world where a lot of software is becoming Open Source, and where businesses are moving most applications into the cloud, where IT infrastructure is becoming a metered utility, and where data-driven customer experiences make or break business results.

It is why we invest in Open Source (e.g. Drupal, Mautic), cloud infrastructure (e.g. Acquia Cloud and Site Factory), and data-centric business tools (e.g. Acquia Lift, Mautic).

We have a lot of work left to do to help businesses see and understand the power of Open Source. I also believe Acquia is an example for how other Open Source companies can do Open Source right, in harmony with their communities.

The work we do at Acquia is interesting, impactful, and, in a positive way, challenging. Working at Acquia means I have a chance to change the world in a way that impacts hundreds of thousands of people. There is nowhere else I’d want to work.

Thank you to our early investors

As part of this transaction, Vista will buy out our initial investors. I want to provide a special shoutout to Michael Skok (North Bridge Venture Partners + Underscore) and John Mandile (Sigma Prima Ventures). I fondly remember Jay Batson and I raising money from Michael and John in 2007. They made a big bet on me — at the time, a college student living in Belgium when Open Source was everything but mainstream.

I’m grateful for the belief and trust they had in me and the support and mentorship they provided the past 12 years. The opportunity they gave me will forever define my professional career. I’m thankful for their support in building Acquia to what it is today, and I am thrilled about what is yet to come.

Stay tuned for great things ahead! It's a great time to be an Acquia customer and Drupal or Mautic user.