Acquia Secures $8 Million in Series B Financing from North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners
ANDOVER, Mass. – July 20, 2009 - Acquia, Inc., the web’s resource for the Drupal social publishing system, today announced it has secured $8 million in a Series B financing round from North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Acquia plans to use the funds for sales, marketing and additional product development to meet growing enterprise demand for the Drupal open source social publishing system.
Acquia offers businesses the quickest path to Social Publishing. Acquia’s Drupal web content management and community tools give brands the power to engage audiences, participate in their conversations and provide those communities with a hub—all necessary traits businesses now need to keep their competitive edge. Drupal with Acquia’s enterprise-grade services and support extends web sites at a lower TCO, for a fraction of the cost of proprietary legacy web content management systems.
“Community engagement through social publishing has completely upended the traditional notions of brand building and customer retention,” said Thomas Erickson, CEO, Acquia. “Static web sites that don’t deliver a compelling experience are dead; it only takes one click to lose someone’s interest in your brand, and the new reality is people want to be communicated with, not just marketed to. Acquia Drupal gives businesses a dead simple on-ramp to build community, loyalty and a more positive brand experience. This latest investment will ensure that Acquia will continue its support of open source Drupal and grow with the project.”
Drupal registers over 250K downloads per month, and is one of the most active open source projects on the Web. Drupal makes it easy to publish content, build communities and create original media. It’s used to deliver a wide variety of Web 2.0 applications including blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and core web content management. The Drupal project is supported by a huge and active ecosystem of consultants and developers making Drupal the social publishing platform for organizations as diverse as media and entertainment, non-profit, education and government. As a member of the global Drupal community, Acquia is committed to advancing Drupal usage by providing simple solutions that offer the confidence, insurance, speed and ROI necessary to serve as a enterprise-ready content management system.
“The Web has moved beyond proprietary web content management systems. Market leading organizations recognize the need to get closer to their influencers, customers, partners and stakeholders with social engagement and community collaboration,“ said Michael J. Skok, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners. “We're delighted to see strong evidence of this with the commercial momentum Acquia is showing as our customers and our partners are both adopting the Acquia Drupal platform, subscriptions and services significantly faster than originally planned. Acquia's obvious momentum may not be defying gravity yet, but it's certainly defying the economy. We’re very happy to be accelerating our investment behind Acquia to both continue to serve our customers and also to invest behind our strengthened team with Tom as CEO and Dries and his leadership in the Drupal community.”
“With hundreds of thousands of downloads each month and over thousands of active contributors - one of the most active in the open source market - Drupal raises the bar on how social websites are built,” said John Mandile, Managing Director at Sigma Partners. “Acquia continues to be a substantial contributor to the Drupal community with its focus on security, user experience and the development of Drupal 7. Its role in this flourishing community serves as an invaluable extension of the technology into the enterprise market.”
About Acquia
Acquia helps organizations of all sizes build social publishing websites quickly, easily and with a lower total cost of ownership by leveraging Drupal, the open source social publishing platform that blends content and community. Our products, services and support enable companies to leverage the power, technical innovation and economic value of Drupal while simplifying the experience, removing the complexity and minimizing the risk. Please visit: http://acquia.com. Download Acquia Drupal, the completely free Drupal distribution, at http://acquia.com/downloads.