Investors Inject Another $8 Million Into Open Source Software Company Talend
Existing investors Balderton Capital, AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners all chipped in again, bringing Talend’s total of funding secured to date to $28 million.
Talend says its flagship open source data solutions have been downloaded more than seven million times to date, and that 2009 was a killer year for the company. The company claims its paying customer base grew 140% to well over 1,000 customers in 2009.
The company says it will use the new funding to further develop and extend its range of open source data integration, data quality and master data management (MDM) solutions.
The three investors (all European, by the way) clearly believe strongly in the company’s ability to disrupt the market, which has historically been dominated by a handful of vendors adopting a traditional proprietary model. Talend chooses to take an open approach by publishing the code of its core and base modules under a GPL license, offering the developer community the ability to improve the product and make enhancements that can benefit everyone.
Balderton Capital, for one, knows the potential of such open source models well, as it played an instrumental role in growing MySQL’s business (the open-source database company was sold to Sun Microsystems for $1 billion in January 2008).