Drupal Platform Acquia Raises $50M Funding Round Led By NEA

Acquia, the digital business solutions provider for Drupal launched by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, today announced that it has raised a $50 million financing round led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation by new investor Split Rock Partners and existing investors North Bridge Venture PartnersSigma PartnersInvestor Growth Capital and Tenaya Capital. NEA general partner Ravi Viswanathan will join the company’s board of directors.

The relationship between Acquia and Drupal is a bit similar to the one between WordPress.com and the open-source WordPress content management service. Acquia, too, is involved in the development of Drupal, but unlike WordPress.com, its focus is more strongly on professional users, enterprises, media sites and developers. As such, it’s probably a bit more akin to website platform Pantheon (which offers both Drupal and WordPress hosting) than WordPress.com.

With today’s round, Acquia has now raised a total of $118.6 million, and the company says it plans to use the new funding to scale its sales and marketing efforts, as well as to double down on big data marketing, personalized engagement and commerce. These areas of focus show Drupal’s flexibility, but also leave no doubt that Acquia’s ambitions range far beyond basic content management. According to Acquia CEO Tom Erickson, the company wants to help “customers maximize their business impact with our open cloud platform for integrated digital experiences.” 

The company’s current product line-up includes a variety of specialized services for high-traffic Drupal sites, e-commerce sites, multisite deployments and support services for Drupal developers. With Acquia Lift, it also offers a sophisticated personalization service for Drupal sites.

According to Acquia’s own data, the company’s bookings in the first quarter of 2014 increased 55 percent compared to the year-ago quarter.