Draper Fisher Jurvetson led a recent $11 Million dollar round of venture capital into SOA Software as a prelude to an IPO by the company. The company has previously raised $30 Million from Redpoint Ventures, Mellon Ventures, Paladin Capital Group, and Palisades Ventures all of whom participated in the most recent round. “This is a critical time in the evolution of the SOA market and the proceeds of this round will help us reach our goal of becoming the first publicly traded SOA infrastructure software company,” chief executive Paul Gigg said in a statement.
Also, Intel Capital has invested $4 Million dollars in WSO2, an open source software company focused on providing integrated Web Services solutions for enterprise developers. Coming quickly on the heels of an investment in Collax, an open source Linux server provider, Intel Capital has invested $4 million dollars into WSO2, a global corporation with offices located in Boston, USA, Portsmouth, UK and Colombo, Sri Lanka. Previous investors in WSO2 include Covalent Technologies, an enterprise open source solutions provider which made a strategic equity investment in WSO2. This partnership enabled Covalent to offer full commercial development and production level support and professional services for Apache Axis to enterprise customers.
Back in April, Cape Clear Software pulled in $15 million in a series D round led by Menlo Park, Calif.-based InterWest Partners, a new investor in Cape Clear. The round also includes investments from Accel Partners, ACT Venture Capital and Greylock Partners, all repeat investors. The new funding will be used to support Cape Clear's global expansion and continued growth in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) market. Cape Clear has offices in Waltham, Massachusetts and offices in Dublin, London, and San Mateo.
The funding of SOA Software, WSO2 and Cape Clear show venture investors continue to have an appetite for companies focused on SOA and Web Services. The WSO2 and Cape Clear investments indicate a growing trend towards development of software in overseas locations, which has proven to be a source of strength for SOA companies like Systinet (a division of Mercury Interactive) in the Czech Republic, Infravio in Chennai India, SymphonySoft (commercial provider of Mule) in Malta. Most larger software companies develop offshore, but this model is emerging in private, venture backed companies.
SOA Software recently acquired SOA software company Blue Titan. WSO2 recently shipped its flagship product, Tungsten.
Community comments
Some things never change
by Jason Carreira,
Re: Some things never change
by Geoffrey Wiseman,
Re: Some things never change
by miko matsumura,
Some things never change
by Jason Carreira,
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It's good to see that the VC's didn't learn anything from the failure of their "me too" lemming attitude of the late 90's or learn the difference between hype and value.
Re: Some things never change
by Geoffrey Wiseman,
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SOA Software: Because the real barrier to full-bore adoption of SOA is the lack of a publicly traded SOA infrastructure company.
Re: Some things never change
by miko matsumura,
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Interesting note of skepticism here I see =) I can see Geoffrey is skeptical of SOA Software's plans to go public, but is Jason directing his comments onto all VC funded companies, all Venture Capitalists in general, or these specific companies named in this posting?
I think WSO2 is very different from SOA Software, no judgement on either as to my point of view. Cape Clear also is very different from the other two... The whole piece was about the trends and recent investments, but each investment is a seperate and potentially news (and comment) worthy event unto itself...
Miko