LAMP start-up ActiveGrid lands $10 million

Start-up ActiveGrid announced Tuesday that it has secured a second-round investment of $10 million led by Worldview Technology Partners, bringing the total invested in the software company to $13 million. The company's original investors, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Allegis Capital, also participated in the funding round, which the company said it will use to ramp up sales and engineering operations.

ActiveGrid's software is designed to build and run large-scale business applications using the so-called LAMP stack, a combination of open-source development products. The company's first product, called ActiveGrid Application Server, is due out this month. ActiveGrid's intends to have a low-end version of its server, which is freely available and open source, while selling licenses for the high-end version of its server. "ActiveGrid makes LAMP a much more viable alternative to J2EE and .Net for people considering building scalable applications," said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Hummer Winblad. "One of the things holding back the adoption (of LAMP) for larger, more serious enterprise applications has been its (degree of) industrial (strength). Something like ActiveGrid ties the pieces of LAMP into an industrial-strength platform."