Acquia, a startup that commercially develops and distributes open source content management system Drupal, has raised a whopping $8 million in series B funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners with Sigma Partners participating. This bring Acquia’s total funding to $15 million.
Acquia, whose co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert created the Drupal platform in 2001, tells TechCrunch that the company will use the funding to help create and expand the market for Drupal in the enterprise world. Drupal hopes to expand its existing base of 200 subscription customers.
Acquia will also use the funding to develop new products and services. Over the past year, Acquia rolled out various products connected to its publishing platform, including Acquia Hosting, Acquia Gardens (think WordPress.com for Drupal) and Acquia Training.
The Drupal platform is built on PHP and MySQL, with the purpose of giving those with minimal programming skills the ability to create interactive websites. Acquia, which aims to be the Red Hat of the Drupal community, was one of the first commercial entities to centralize open source development efforts.