14 DAY TRIAL // Acquia, the company that's been overseeing the development of the Drupal open source CMS, has announced that it raised $55 million / €49.25 million in a Series G funding round.
Acquia is the company founded by Dries Buytaert (and Jay Batson), the man that created the famous Drupal CMS, and is to Drupal what Automattic is to WordPress.
The company is not the official overseer of the Drupal CMS, which still remains a community-driven project, but it's been lurking in the shadows, making sure everything goes as it should.
Acquia is to Drupal what Automattic is to WordPress
Besides watching over Drupal’s development, Acquia has also expanded into the world of third party-hosted CMS products, providing a Drupal site builder that runs in the cloud, along with Mollom, a spam fighting service, in the same category as Akismet, the spam protection system that comes bundled with all WordPress installations.
In recent news posted on its website, the company announced another round of funding, this time raising $55 million / €49.25 million from investors like Centerview Capital Technology, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and Split Rock Partners.
With this recent funding round, the company has now brought in investments totaling $188.6 million / €168.9 million.
Acquia is heading towards an IPO
Previously the company managed to raise $50 million / €44.75 million back in May 2014, and another $30 million / €26.85 million in November 2012, when it also said it was close to an IPO.
That didn't happen, but the rumors resurfaced with every new funding series, and today was no exception.
Why so much interest in a simple open source CMS? Probably because many PHP geeks consider Drupal to be superior to WordPress in many (technical) ways, but the platform's over-complicated publishing procedures have stopped it from gaining more market share.
Despite this, the CMS has been used with many large websites around the Internet, none bigger than the White House's homepage. Other famous sites that have opted to use Drupal over Joomla and WordPress include Weather.com, Standford University, Minnesota University, Rutgers University, Georgetown University, Greenpeace, Red Hat, The Economist, Al Jazeera, Fox News, the city of London, the city of Los Angeles, Wizards of the Coast, and the Dallas Cowboys NFL team.