Only a few days ago did Dries Buytaert, the Belgian developer behind Drupal, the open-source content management system, decide to launch a start-up to take parts of the effort commercial. Today, Acquia, the company formed to pusue that effort, has gathered together a $7 million first round investment. The round was led by North Bridge Venture Partners as well as Sigma Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
Buytaert put Acquia together to be "a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux. If we want Drupal to grow by at least a factor of 10, keeping Drupal a hobby project as it is today, and taking a regular programming job at a big Belgian bank is clearly not going to cut it.”
Far from working at the bank, the substantial investment is said to be going towards the "establishment of value-added software and services around Drupal." I'm a little under the weather today, and my press-release-to-English translator is a bit rusty today, but we assume that means Buytaert will hire a team to fix bugs and develop new features.
Drupal started as a hobby project of Buytaert, but has grown to no small respectability. Current Drupal users include many small forum and New Media projects like The Onion and RantMedia as well as established brands like SonyBMG, Warner, and Forbes.
[via PaidContent]