100 Million And Counting...

100 Million Dollars.

This is the amount of open source funding I have come across in my 22 weeks of compiling The Open Source Update since March 2005. This is by no means a complete survey of open source funding during the period, and this does not include any funding in the Linux hardware or hosted services space (areas we don't cover in depth).

Known Open Source Investments, March-August 2005

NOTE: All amounts are listed in US Dollars. If multiple funding rounds are listed, only the most recent one took place in the review period.

ActiveGrid
LAMP Stack
$10M Series B (Worldview Technology, Hummer Winblad, Allegis)
$3M Series A (Hummer Winblad, Allegis)

Alfresco
Content Management
$2M Seed (Accel)

Black Duck
Software Compliance Management
$12B Series B (Fidelity, Intel, SAP)
$5M Series A (Flagship, General Catalyst, Red Hat)

EnterpriseDB
Enterprise Database
$??? Series A pending
$??? Seed (Gary Long, ???)

Funambol
Mobile Synchronization
$5M Series A (Walden International, H.I.G.)

Greenplum
Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing
$??? (Dawntreader, EDF, Hudson, Mission)

GroundWork
IT Management
$8.5M Series B (Mayfield)
$4M Series A (Canaan)

JasperSoft
Reporting Solutions
$8M Series C (Partech International, Doll, Moregnthaler)

Laszlo
Rich Internet Application Platform
$6.25M Series B (Mitsui, Sofinnova)
$12M Series A (General Catalyst)

Logicalware
Email Management
$550k Seed (Sigma Innovation, Bill Dobbie)

OpenLogic
Developer Stack Certification
$4M Series A (Appian, Red Rock, Highway 12, Village)

Pentaho
Business Intelligence
$5M Series A pending
$500K Seed (???)

Simula Labs
Open Source "Incubator"
$10-$15m (Redpoint, Mission)

SpikeSource
Stack Certification
$12M Series A (Fidelity, KPCB, Intel, Omidyar Network)

Ubuntu
Linux Distribution
$10m

Univa
Grid Infrastructure
$8M Series A (ARCH, New World, Appian, OCA)

If we add to this the amounts presented in Michael Goulde's recent talk, "Open Source Software: At the Crossroads" at the Forrester GigaWorld IT Forum in May 2005, the total amount of recent (say, the past 18 months or so) open source funding is even higher.

MySQL: $19.5M, JBoss: $10M, SugarCRM: $7.75M, Jabber: $7.2M, Optaros: $7M, GlueCode: $5M (purchased by IBM for considerably more than this), and SourceLabs: $3.5M.

And let's not forget Palamida: $5M.

165 Million Dollars.

The rate of open source investment is increasing. It's all too easy to compare the current situation with the last major speculative technology investment period, whether appropriate or not. This is starting to feel like 1997 or 1998.

How is it different this time? Is this good news for the open source community? Will the new wave of funding bring tension between purely open source plays and "proprietary open source" vendors? Is all of this speculative or are the business plans sound? Are all these VCs hoping for a GlueCode? Is everyone focused on services and support revenue?

Post your feedback and please send us any corrections to the funding list above. We'd love to know what you think! This is a community, after all.