Acquia, the company building a commercial business around the open-source Drupal content management technology, now has $50 million in new funding, bringing total investment to a tidy $118.6 million.
The cash influx will be used to build out sales and marketing -- including adding to more channel partners -- and to push the use of its product in personalized marketing commerce applications, according to a statement.
The round, disclosed in a blog post by Acquia CTO and co-founder Dries Buytaert, was led by new backer New Enterprise Associates with participation from Split Rock Partners. Existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, Investor Growth Capital, Tenaya Capital, and Accolade Partners also participated.
The Burlington, Mass. company looks to be on the road to an IPO having just brought on board Bill Sorenson as CFO, according to BostInno. Sorenson, helped shepherd Qlik Technologies and Blade Logic through IPOs of their own.
It looks like open-source content management systems (CMS) category is heating up. Two weeks ago, Pantheon, a company that offers SaaS-based content management based either on Drupal or WordPress technologies, netted $21.5 million in Series B funding from OpenView Partners and others.
Acquia is as well positioned as anyone to take on the Drupal-based content management market -- for one thing Buyaert invented Drupal. And it claims a healthy list of customers including CareerBuilder, Angie's List, Mother Jones, Intel(s intc), Ericsson and several colleges including Babson, Duke University and UNLV.