A new generation of database products and companies is beginning to emerge, and one of the more interesting examples is Swedish-based Neo Technology, the developer and vendor of the neo4j graph based database (graph in the data structure sense). The neo4j product has been in development for over 8 years, and Neo Technology are today announcing a new $2.5M round of funding. The company has been developing the neo4j project as a commercial product, and is now taking it to market with a dual-license model.
MÃ¥rten Gustaf Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, is Benchmark Capital’s newest Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR).
Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with Index Ventures back in 2003.
Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology and is also a board member of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale.
Many entrepreneurs who muzzle through a successful exit use some of the proceeds to become an angel investor and help other startups get, well, started.
And that’s not exclusively a Silicon Valley thing.
Stockholm, Sweden-based Mobile Sorcery has just raised an early-stage investment round amounting up to 1.5 million Swedish Kronor (approximately €145k or $206k USD), for the most part coming from MySQL founders David Axmark and Michael Widenius. You may remember MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems back in January 2008 for approximately $1 billion after raising only $39 million in venture capital. It’s safe to say both co-founders walked away with enough cash to use some of it for angel investment in promising companies.
The big news this morning is that open source database startup MySQL finally found a year’s worth of rumors that they were mulling over an initial public offering. Sun Microsystems has acquired them instead, for $1 billion. MySQL had raised a total of $39 million from Benchmark, Index, IVP, Intel, and SAP.
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote about the acquisition on his blog, lavishing praise on MySQL: “MySQL is by far the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating network services. From Facebook, Google and Sina.com to banks and telecommunications companies, architects looking for performance, productivity and innovation have turned to MySQL. In high schools and college campuses, at startups, at high performance computing labs and in the Global 2000. The adoption of MySQL across the globe is nothing short of breathtaking. They are the root stock from which an enormous portion of the web economy springs.”
Startups with similar business models – managing a free open source project and bolting for-pay services on as a business model, will be happy to see this. Wordpress and OpenAds are two that we follow closely.
Automattic, the company that created the Wordpress.com blogging platform and oversees the Wordpress.org open source project, has rejected a $200 million acquisition offer, say multiple sources. Half the price was to be paid in cash, half in stock in the buyer.
The company, which has raised just $1.1 million in capital, has been on a tear lately. They acquired avatar startup Gravatar earlier this month. And Comscore says Wordpress.com had nearly 63 million unique worldwide visitors in September 2007, up 66% from May’s 38 million visitors. What I don’t know is the company’s revenue.
Building a real business around open source software is doable – see RedHat’s $4.1 billion market cap as an example. And rumor is that MySQL is planning an IPO of their own in the near future. For Automattic to spurn a $200 million offer means they are thinking along the lines of going public themselves, or at least a significantly higher acquisition price. Down the road, with the benefit of hindsight, we’ll know if they made the right decision or not.
Automattic declined to comment on this post.
One of the most-anticipated tech IPOs of the year has been that of open-source database company MySQL. It seemed like they were ready to go public back in the beginning of the year. Now I am hearing chatter from hedge fund circles that the filing may be imminent. Last I checked, nothing has been filed with the SEC yet. Investors, including Benchmark, Index, IVP, Intel, and SAP, have put in more than $39 million to date.
MySQL claims a 25 percent share of the database market. It is unclear how compelling its economics are, but if its IPO does well (assuming it ever happens), that would open the door eventually for other open-source startups such as Openads (open-source ad server) and Automattic (which has built a business on top of the open-source blogging platform, Wordpress), among others.
