Pentaho Receives $8M in Series B Funding

Leading Venture Capital Firms Invest in an Accelerated Growth Plan for The World’s Most Popular Open Source BI Suite

Pentaho Corp., creator of the world’s most popular Open Source business intelligence (BI) suite, today announced that it has received an additional $8M in funding in order to further fuel its accelerated growth. Pentaho’s existing investors, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Index Ventures, funded the entire series B financing round.

Andre M. Boisvert, Pentaho’s Chairman and co-founder stated, “We are delighted with the fact that the market’s adoption of our leading Open Source BI platform has gathered such momentum. In order for the Company to be in a position to fully capitalize on this trend, the Board of Directors approved the acceleration of the initial business plan and additional growth capital.” Boisvert went on to add, “Savvy venture firms always want to put additional capital to work in their most promising portfolio companies. Our existing investors clearly saw the opportunity to increase their stake in Pentaho and accelerate the company’s growth in the process.”

Demand for the Pentaho BI project has grown from 5,000 downloads/month in August 2005 to more than 55,000/month in June 2006. These numbers show that there is clear demand from the marketplace for Pentaho’s Open Source BI solution.

Vladimir Jacimovic, NEA Partner and Pentaho Director, stated, “The success behind the Pentaho BI project is an indication and validation that Open Source BI is being seriously considered and implemented by customers. A recent survey by Ventana Research has found that 43% of organizations are evaluating Open Source BI solutions and that another 40% are actually deploying Open Source BI solutions. When you couple these facts with Pentaho’s leading position in the Open Source BI market place, it was an easy decision to step up our investment.”

Industry surveys continue to rank Business Intelligence as one of the top five focus areas for IT investment. Leading research firm IDC is predicting that the BI market will grow by 10% to almost $6.5B in software spending in 2006. Richard Daley, Pentaho’s CEO and co-founder, stated, “We felt that by taking in additional capital we could more rapidly execute on our product roadmap, thereby giving customers and the community more reasons to give up on proprietary offerings sooner rather than later.”

Bernard Dalle, Partner at Index Ventures and Pentaho Director, said, “We believe that Pentaho has the vision, a strong team, the best technology and the support of a smart, global community to become the single most significant force in business intelligence. As such, we were eager to increase our investment and we look forward to continuing to work with such a dynamic and exciting company.”