Open Source Weblog

While we have a good track record of covering financial results and investment funding for the largest vendors, many of the initial open source investments occurred before vendors were large enough to be on CBR’s radar. We have rectified that situation now, which is why I can be sure the 2006 figure is pretty accurate, but we do have some historical gaps.

As Matt Asay noted, he and Robin Vasan calculated at the start of 2006 that there had been $1.3bn in open source VC funding in the last five years.

I’ve pulled their figures into our own (and also found a few new ones from the archives) and will have a new calculation for the total invested in open source vendors based on this early in the New Year.

(I am rebuilding the spreadsheet as well as my ham-fisted Excel "skills" have made it near-incomprehensible to anyone other than me, hence the delay).

The reason there are some gaps is because we want written confirmation of these details, whether that be a press release, official statement, news story or trusted blog entry. These are the known unknowns:

- When did Clovis Solutions land its $6m in Series A funding and which VCs were involved?

- How much did Fonality get in Series A funding, when, and who from?

- JasperSoft apparently raised $10 in its second round funding, but when was that?

- When did Melodeo secure its $2.2m Series A funding round?

- How much did Scali raise in its Series A funding round, and when?

- When did Trolltech raise its $6.7m Series A funding?

- When did Zend raise its $2.7m Series A funding?

- Zimbra raised $16m in Series A and B funding, but how was this shared out, and when?

In addition we would also like confirmation of the details of the following companies' Series A funding rounds:

Zope
Covalent
DataCore
Collabnet
DeviceScape
Orion Multisystems
Solid Information

If anyone has any answers to these, we’d appreciate hearing them, and we’ll try and find a way of publishing the whole thing once we’ve pulled it all together.