Dries Buytaert

Today we announced that Acquia has raised $7 million from a group of venture capital (VC) firms. That's a wonderful vote of confidence in Drupal, and a testament to the incredible opportunity that lies before all of us. And it means that Acquia is going to be able to help the Drupal community make Drupal even better.

So you're probably thinking: "Wow, that's a lot of money! What are you going to do with it all?". Well, we're going to do what we said we would do earlier this month: build a company that develops a number of Drupal distributions and that offers electronic services that make Drupal easier to use and manage. The funding allows us to quickly bring together a world-class team, rent office space, buy equipment, etc. Starting a great company is not cheap, especially if you have big dreams and plans. In fact, Jay summed up our goals nicely.

Working with Jay to get this capital secured was an incredible experience: strolling around the areas where VCs all put their offices in Boston and on Sand Hill Road in California, doing the work to show market opportunity, create business plans, working up the courage to pitch investors in partner meetings, and working with the lawyers on the mountains of paperwork. I certainly learned a lot about what investors look for, how they make decisions, etc.

One of the things I'm really proud of is the quality of the investors that Jay and I managed to attract. Just like investors are extremely selective with regard to the companies they invest in, we have been picky about the VC firms that we wanted to work with. There have been few businesses that have tried to do what we're about to do, and so I'm really happy that we found investors that really "get" open source.

Now the money is in the bank, our first challenge is to build out the rest of the Acquia team. Many of our people will be working on things other than Drupal. They'll be building and testing services we plan to provide over the Internet, providing support to our customers, and evangelizing and building awareness for Acquia products and Drupal in general.

However, a good number of Acquia people will be working 100% on Drupal, alongside the rest of the community. This is an important investment, because Acquia succeeds only if Drupal succeeds, and we're going to do our part. We'll contribute code, QA testing and other important things like user experience design, marketing, documentation, etc. We'll talk more about our plans in the near future.

All in all, I think it's a great time to be a Drupal user.