acquia

North Andover's Acquia Inc. reports closing a Series A round of financing.

Acquia attracted $7 million in a round led by North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, company officials said.

Acquia develops products based on Drupal, an open-source platform for Web 2.0 applications such as single or multi-user blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and core web content management. The Drupal platform has been downloaded more than 2 million times since it was released in 2001, the year it was originally created by Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert.

Founded only a few months ago, Acquia is a North Andover, Mass. startup that capitalizes on a content management system written by its co-founder in 2001.

Dries Buytaert, the Belgian developer behind the Drupal open-source content management system, is launching a start-up to take parts of the effort commercial. Debuted in 2001, Drupal powers newspaper sites including Bluffton Today, New York Observer, SavannahNow.com and Dagbladet Information, but it has remained a non-profit project heavily supported by a developer community and a recently formed association.

"It is very important to me that Acquia has a marketing leader who understands the importance of growing and sustaining a community and who is passionate about the principles of open source software," said Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert as Jeff Whatcott joined the company as vice president of marketing, responsible for all marketing activity. Whatcott recently arrived from Adobe, where he led marketing for LiveCycle and Flex.