Interface21 Gets $10M in Funding

Interface21, the company behind the popular Spring Framework, announced it has received $10 million in Series A financing from Benchmark Capital.

The company announced the news at the JavaOne show here.Interface21 officials said the new funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand marketing, sales and support infrastructure to meet the growing enterprise demand for Spring products and services.

Despite rumors that Interface21 had been a target for acquisition, Rod Johnson, the company's CEO and founder of the Spring Framework, told eWEEK last month: "We plan to remain independent." This funding helps with that.

Interface21 officials said that Spring Framework, a lightweight Java development platform, has been downloaded more than three million times to date. And the company claims its level of penetration exceeds that of any single application server. However, Interface21 has partnerships with application server vendors and middleware providers such as IBM, Oracle and BEA Systems.

"For nearly a decade, Benchmark has maintained a deep conviction in the transformative power of open source on the software industry," said Peter Fenton, general partner, Benchmark Capital , said in a statement. "Through our investments in Red Hat, MySQL and JBoss, we have seen first hand how the democracy of adoption and direct access, enabled by open source, radically improves the software value proposition for enterprise customers."

However, Fenton said that very few open-source projects achieve critical mass, and even fewer drive fundamental product innovations.

"Interface21 and its Spring Framework possess extremely rare qualities that we believe will lead to open-source success - near ubiquitous adoption, a profitable business model, and a compelling vision that delivers innovative offerings to the enterprise."

Meanwhile, Johnson said in a statement: "This initial funding comes at a key moment for Interface21, as the use of Spring continues to proliferate and as we scale to meet the needs of our rapidly growing developer community and customer base."

Copyright 2007 by Ziff Davis Media, Distributed by United Press International