Economic crisis aside some companies are still managing to innovate, grow and get the interest of the VC community. In a round led by Balderton Capital (one of the early investors in MySQL) and AGF Private Equity (an existing investor in Talend) Talend raised $12M, bringing their total funding to $20M. In addition Balderton general partner Bernard Liautaud (founder and former CEO and Chairman of Business Objects, recently acquired by SAP) joined Talend's board. Talend intends to use the funding to fuel worldwide expansion and continued growth.
Why all the interest in Talend? There are several factors that come together that make Talend a very interesting investment. The data integration market grew around 21% in 2007 and close to 10% in 2008 (a troubled year where in contrast application software only grew around 6%), so they're in a "hot" market. Over the last few years we have seen customers deploying more mixed brand suites than large, monolithic single brand suites. In addition, customers are consuming software in a variety of models from on premise to SaaS / Cloud-based or even SW appliances. As this trend has accelerated data integration has become even more important and complex (and expensive). That makes an open source integration solution, if high quality, very compelling and customers are voting for Talend by downloading, using and paying for the solutions. In two years Talend's Open Studio solutions have been downloaded over 3.3 million times and paying customers ger over 300% last year. And these customers are not just small or medium businesses, Talend also counts companies like SNCF, Virgin Mobile, Levolor, and MediaLab (to name a few) among its customers. If you follow this blog, you know I believe that open source software could do much better than the market average in spite of (or because of) the economic crisis. Talend looks like a start up to watch!
